The Challenge
Sweden actively recruits international talent, but many of these hires leave within a few years — not because of their jobs, but because their spouses struggle to find work and integrate. These are often highly educated, experienced, multilingual individuals, yet they fall through the cracks of support systems.
This challenge leads to a double loss of national investment — the recruit and their spouse. It also contradicts Sweden's values of gender equality and social inclusion.
Belmas is a consortium of public and private partners financially supported by Vinnova. The consortium, including Lund University, the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsfömedlingen), and more, set out to address significant loss in the labor market with an all-in-one digital platform.
Block Zero was brought in to lead the project's design efforts, from service design and branding to UX/UI of the digital concept and user validation study.
Stakeholder Alignment & Product Vision
Each consortium partner entered the project with ideas rooted in their own expertise. However, there was little shared understanding of how these pieces fit into a one solution.
To address this, we ran an alignment session centered on the target user profile, their painpoints and needs.
Once we aligned, we organized a product vision workshop to collaboratively explore how each partner's services could complement one another within a unified user journey and coordinated touchpoints.
Shaping The Core Experience
The results from the workshops informed the feature prioritization, core platform flows and the initial wireframes that we validated with the consortium partners.
While addressing user needs in the core UX strategic work, we also gained users' trust through the brand identity. By researching existing solutions in the space and running ideation sessions with the partners, we arrived at a visual language that felt reassuring, welcoming, professional but still very approachable —something that we hypothesized would resonate with our target users.
We developed a friendly and approachable brand identity that balances warmth with professionalism to build trust and credibility.
Validation Study
Once the MVP concept was prototyped, we conducted an early validation study to test our assumptions with real users. Rather than focusing on detailed usability, our goal was to evaluate overall product–market fit, the visual direction and tone of voice, and the relevance of the feature set.
We ran a qualitative study with 11 expat spouses from six countries (the USA, Brazil, India, Ukraine, Vietnam and Portugal) ranging in age from 29 to 60 and representing diverse fields such as IT, education, biology, and entrepreneurship.
The feedback confirmed a strong demand for guidance in integrating into Swedish society and labor market, and helped us prioritize content and features for future releases.
Outcomes
Our contribution included a fully designed MVP, along with valuable qualitative insights that complemented the existing quantitative data. This concept and research provided a strong foundation for future development and demonstrated the need for services in this space. Together, these outcomes provide continued value to Belmas for future funding efforts and offer a clear direction for progress for the product.
