From an Administrative Challenge to Supporting International Students in Their Integration in Portugal

Governments worldwide struggle to help newcomers navigate administrative requirements clearly, quickly and confidently. In Portugal, this challenge becomes especially visible during the arrival of thousands of international students each academic semester. These students face fragmented, jargon‑heavy processes to obtain essential identification numbers (Tax number, Social Security Number, National Health number), creating confusion for users and pressure on frontline services. Our project directly targets this gap, and the session will demonstrate how, by designing and testing the Orientation Form Prototype for foreign students as a focused mobile‑first digital triage tool, we transformed recurring field challenges into the foundations of a scalable prototype.