A human-centered approach to improving the immigration application experience
The journey from research to design ideation
“To find ideas, find problems. To find problems, talk to people.”
Julie Zhou
Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has a big problem. There is an overwhelming level of rejection amongst applicants wanting to immigrate to Canada. This was what we were told early on to the research process, but what we later discovered is there is a lot more going on than just rejection levels. The process of immigration itself holds significant usability issues, and the constraints of form design, and a slow shift to digitize all characterize an applicant’s journey applying to immigrate to Canada.
This research focused on gaining insights on the overall application process for a new pilot project called the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot (RNIP). The research question which underpinned this project was: “How might we identify, and improve usability issues related to the application process of RNIP.” The objective was therefore to understand and solve various usability issues faced by RNIP applicants during the entire application process, then look at possible design driven solutions.
INITIAL RESEARCH
We began with a deep dive into the program, and forms. This was the first milestone where we really got immersed into our program. We quickly found out RNIP was quite complicated. This foreshadowed some key findings we came about during the later phases.
INTERVIEWS AND DATA ANALYSIS
The second phase of the journey was all about data collection, curation and analysis. We learned so much from our interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Users. It seemed that with each interview more and more insights were being uncovered. This propelled deep insights on the application process at large.
Based on our findings we came up with a journey map to represent the various emotions for each phase of the 11 steps for an applicant applying to RNIP. The ups and downs that an applicant experiences was important to highlight, and put our findings into perspective.
3 DESIGN SPRINTS
Design sprints are an excellent tool for design thinking with rapid testing and ideation. The first phase of the design sprint was the Ideation. During this we used our experience principles to guide us towards brainstorming How Might We (HMW) statements.
From here, we ditched the computers and grabbed our pencils and sketched various recommendations tackling these HMW’s. Here are some of the sketches that inspired our final prototype.
The next phase was to Prototype these sketches. For this we reiterated our ideas based on the feedback from IRCC. We decided to use Adobe XD to create a UI layout for an immigration portal.
These early concepts for the prototype were shown to IRCC in a client meeting. The feedback from IRCC meetings acted as another milestone giving us insights such as why accessibility is the key to create a design solution which concerns government and people.
We then conducted usability testing with 5 users, two of which were repeat users from our original user interviews. From our usability testing we were able to identify some key insights, and suggestions to improve our final round of prototype ideation. A few of the usability insights included:
- Typography, color, and size was important to our users — and this went beyond just looks but actually impacted how they completed tasks
- The ability to have everything in one place through the portal UI meant a lot to users who could imagine themselves as an RNIP applicant in need of such a service
Below are the main changes done to the portal home screen.
Some changes we made to our design from the original prototype reflected what our users suggested. We increased the button size of the guide and checklist, as well as moved them over to the right to be on their own and have them stand out more. We also made the title font larger along with the font of each form number. The progress bar on the top was added. This directly responds to one of our experience principles which is “help me to understand where I am in the process”. When we asked our test users many felt it would be a great addition, with 4 of of them saying to add it on the front screen. The select language options is important to note as many RNIP users (including ones we spoke too) do not have english as a native language so the option to switch language is crucial for ensuring they are able to navigate the portal comfortably.
WHATS NEXT?
We hope one day the use of smart analytics (such as behavioral insights gathering and AI) will be used to co-create an immigration journey that begins and ends without any need of forms. This will help to streamline the process and make the journey of both applicants and the IRCC officials much easier.
This project is done in collaboration with Priyamvada Singh, Shivani Srivastava and Rita Kloosterma.
