Supporting refugees in every day life – Intercultural design evaluation of an application for local information

An unpreceded number of refugees have fled to Europe in the last years. When arriving in a new country, refugees need information on topics such as the asylum process, locations of language courses or opening hours of an Arabic speaking physician. However, refugees report an information deficit when arriving in the host countries. We address this information deficit by developing design principles for mobile applications that transmit local information to refugees with different cultural background. We develop a smart phone application that presents complex information in an understandable and intuitive manner to support refugees. To derive design principles, we applied a Design Science Research approach based on a requirements analysis via a survey among refugees. Subsequently, the mobile application’s design is iteratively improved based on the results of three user studies with 127 participants of Arabic, African, and Western background. With the improved design, users are faster and more successful in finding the required information. We use these insights to derive design principles for transmitting information to users with different cultural background. This contributes to literature on how IS can support refugees and how findings from Human-Computer-Interaction research can be applied in an intercultural setting.