Passport renewal service scale-up
After successfully validating our Passport Renewal service for United States, we are ready to scale-up the product for new markets
October 2021 - January 2022
UX Designer
Heuristic Evaluation / Information Architecture / User journey / Prototyping / User tests / User Interviews / Front-end programming
Tools
Figma / Illustrator / Trello / Google Suit / Visual Studio / GitHub
Where are we starting from
Our validated MVP
The first stage of this project was to ideate and implement the MVP, a passport renewal phygital service for the USA, when I joined the company one year ago the product was already on service.
As we reached our MVP’s KPIs, it was time to keep growing and reach new markets.
In the process, we gathered really interesting insights and user data, as well as the know-how for the service logistics, as this is a phygital experience, our delivery times and physical part of the process plays a heavy role on the overall UX.
Scaling-up to new markets
iVisa business model relies on a simplified scalable process for all their products, this approach allows the company to reach an extended user base at the same time that provides value to their customers.
This means that deep research needs to be done in order to understand each market's complexity and opportunities, as well as what users in each country value the most and what are their main pain points.
Discover
Market analysis
The idea was to use our extensive international user base to gather data related to interest in the service, in addition to our learnings from the MVP implementation.
An opportunity analysis was conducted by the team, using parameters like process complexity, digitalization degree, processed passports, purchasing power and population size.
This helped us scope down the list of possible countries from hundreds to less than 10.
Competitor Analysis
The selected countries were:
- Ireland – The most digitized process, no need to send their current passport
- UK – Highly digitized process, digital photo and shipment of their current passport is needed
- Canada – Highly manual process, printed & signed form, printed photos, and shipment of their current passport are needed
We looked into each country’s possible competitors, and to our surprise we didn’t find a lot of competition that would offer a digital solution or match our price ranges.
This opportunity also allows us to benchmark their value proposition, communication, and features.
User research
In order to understand the experiences and pain points of each country's citizens, I conducted a series of explorative interviews with users that recently renewed their passport (post-pandemic experience).
- When do people decide to renew their passports?
- How do they find information about the process?
- How do they feel about the provided information?
- Did they look for assistance or external information anytime in the process? If so, why?
- What is, in their consideration, the hardest part of the process? Why is that?
- Any part of the process was considerably easier than what they expected?
- How did they manage to get their passport photos? Why did they select that option?
- How confident were they when sending their application?
- After finishing the process, what would they do differently?
General insights
- Information seem to complex, there are a lot of special considerations, technical terms, specific documentation to process
- Information is hard to access, the government sites information architecture doesn’t follow user’s mental model, they are not confident that they can access
- Having a professional photo service gives peace of mind that their photo will be accepted, but going to a photo studio is a pain point.
- External information (blogs, videos, etc) provide more understandable data, but users are not sure that it is up to date.
- Not being sure that the form that they filled is correct produces anxiety, users feel that any error will result in losing time and money, even a trip if they have any.
Define
Creating the service blueprint
After the discovery phase, we were ready to start creating our new services, as a first step a service blueprint was created per country, this allowed us to define what capabilities were needed and what an MVP would look like.
This deliverable was made with the project PM and an Operations analyst.
Mapping the Upper Funnel UX
It was my duty to map out the current state of the upper funnel and detect opportunities to increase organic conversion, another one of our OKRs for this year.
One of the main opportunities detected was in our blog system, currently, iVisa relies on a quantity vs quality strategy to produce these blogs.
This strategy provided great results as our SEO and organic traffic increased, but we have been reaching limited growth lately, that’s why I proposed to try the opposite, less better-crafted blogs that provide more value to our users.
These blogs would not directly “sell” any of our services, but would invite the users to learn more
Defining the Communication Plan
But creating an awesome product is of no use if no one knows about it, that is why I worked with our content strategist to define a communication plan that is both efficient and scalable.
I ideated a product page with different phases depending on the product stage, from the moment that we detect a business opportunity until we have a fully defined service.
Under Construction, provides valuable info -> Waiting list, creates hype -> Full service, focus on conversion
Under Construction, provides valuable info -> Waiting list, creates hype -> Full service, focus on conversion
It is important to start building a website early on to improve our SEO and rely more on organic traffic than paid ads.
This multi-variant website would receive traffic from our own organic traffic using our navigation (another project in which I participated), our value-driven blogs, and our ads campaign and social media.
Develop
Solution Wireframes
Based on the gathered data and established plans, I designed several wireframes with potential solutions:
- Value-driven blogs, more informative and less selling efforts
- Under-construction website, informative and oriented with up-to-date information
- Waiting-list website, when we start building the product, creates awareness and measures possible interests in the service
- Full-service website that communicates the solution at the same time that provides valuable information, conversion-oriented
All these solutions had a special emphasis on making them modular and scalable to comply with iVisa’s general product strategy.
Tech, Marketing & OP review
These wireframes were presented to our Operations, Dev, and Marketing teams to gather feedback about feasibility, needed capabilities, and resources, as well as general recommendations and opinions.
I find it crucial to not only take in considerations or direct users (our customers) but also our indirect users (our agents, devs, etc) when creating a product, being on the same page increases our cooperation as a team.
- A blog search system would require to implement a tagging system, this is possible but requires considerable dev resources, better to implement this feature later on
- We are repeating our Trustpilot score twice, why don’t we instead publish real reviews?
- What happens if we can not renew a user passport? We can still provide relevant information for their particular situation
- To properly maintaining our FAQ database, we need a backend management feature, this is a good time to implement it
- Let’s take in considerations our keywords when writing the FAQs, this is a smart way of improving our SEO
Hi-Fi Prototypes
After several rounds of analysis and feedback from the involved teams, I worked on the Hi-Fi prototypes of each page.
These prototypes were validated through several sessions of user tests and a final end-to-end service test.
As understanding the service and value proposition was more important than usability, I conducted moderated test sessions instead of unmoderated ones.
User testing and service validation
With a product that finally has shape, we started to test the end-to-end service, this means not only testing the prototypes but also the communication channels and the operations behind the scenes.
To do that I created a test plan per country, as every market has its own particular needs and hypothesis to be tested.
Each test plan consisted of:
- Homepage think aloud, to validate that our service and proposition value are being communicated properly
- Form fill-up, to understand how users feel about the form, especially focusing on complex or critical questions
- Documentation shipment (if needed), to test our instructional design, as well as each country delivery logistics and post-sale service
- New passport delivery, final test wrap-up, and a feedback-focus less structured session is conducted
This holistic approach allowed us to detect & solve product weaknesses, as well as have real hand-on experience before finally launching the product to the public.
I managed the team in order to have the different product components aligned and ready to be tested.
So far we have finished the test sessions for the UK and Canada, we still need to test Ireland.
Deliver (in process)
Current project situation
- Training content is being created for the Operations team based on the test’s insights and learnings.
- The marketing team has a ready-to-launch strategy using our value-driven blogs and email marketing to increase product awareness.
- Our under-construction sites have been successful in increasing our SEO, and work as a foundation for our organic traffic.
- Wrapping up Canada research results, testing Ireland afterward
Once the service test rounds are finished, we will do a final wrap-up to sustain the final steps before the product launching
Project next steps
- After each product reaches its own KPIs, we will work in future iterations including more renewal cases and add-ons
- If they don’t reach their KPIs, we will do an analysis to find why and decide if iterate or kill the product
- The second growth stage includes Australia, United Arab Emirates, and Singapore