Optimising the emergency travel document service

Client: Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)

Length: 6 months+

Key contributions: service, UX and UI design, user research, stakeholder management, product strategy.

Overview

As part of its Enabling Emergency Travel service group, the FCDO provides British Nationals with an Emergency travel document (ETD) service.

A British National can apply for an ETD if they are overseas, need to travel urgently and cannot get a British passport in time. An ETD allows the document holder to travel a set route for a single or return journey but is not a replacement for a passport.

The ETD service was launched online in 2015/16 and allowed applicants who had previously held a British passport in the last 10 years to apply for an ETD. It did not, however, allow British citizens who had never held a passport or whose passport has expired over 10 years ago to apply online. The service had not been reviewed or changed since launching and was encumbered by legacy infrastructure, poor processes and a lack of data which made the service slow and inefficient.

Objectives

  • To design and build an online journey for applicants who have not had a valid British passport in the last 10 years - known internally as ‘first time applicants’ (FTAs) to replace the existing manual, email based application process 

  • To identify, design and implement improvements to the internal systems and processes used to process both regular and FTA ETD applications by the global contact centres to reduce processing times and save costs

The team and my role

The team consisted of a service designer (me),  user researcher, delivery manager, business analyst, technical lead, software developer x 2, data analyst and product manager.

As the service designer on the project my responsibilities included mapping, designing and prototyping multiple complex journeys for both internal and external users. Leading stakeholder management and buy in through relationship building to understand their wants, needs and fears, and designing and facilitating workshops to ensure the solutions being proposed and implemented worked for all the stakeholders and service users.

The team worked in an Agile way and I collaborated closely with everyone - in particular the technical lead, user researcher and product manager to help set the strategy and design for the service.

Challenges

  • No recorded user research insights, findings or user needs to use as a starting point

  • No service blueprints, process or journey maps

  • No data capture or analytics across the service or systems

  • Service maintenance and transformation was spread across several suppliers with no in house digital or technical resource

  • Multiple stakeholders across different government departments and geographical locations

  • A historically policy led service rather than user centred

  • No clear service ownership or strategy

  • Quick delivery timeline with little space for Discovery or testing

Approach

Kick-starting the project

I created a ‘kick-off’ canvas and facilitated a remote session with key stakeholders from policy, global contact centres, consulate services and posts to determine the project objectives, roles and responsibilities, scope of work, users and what ‘success’ would look like. This ensured both internal stakeholders and my team had a unified understanding and approach to get the project started. I then made sure to keep close contact with my key stakeholders throughout the project - constantly playing back insights and ideas to them to make sure we were on the right track and keeping the core objectives in mind. 

Mapping out the ‘as-is’ service

I spent the first few weeks of the project reviewing all available technical documentation on the existing service, conducting desk research and interviewing the internal users in order to create service blueprints and process maps in Miro that showed how the service currently worked, the actors, systems, data and touchpoints involved throughout. These artefacts were incredibly useful for challenging internal beliefs about how the service was ‘supposed’ to run as opposed to how it actually ran.

Example process map for the emergency travel document service

Research and ideation

Research was conducted across two distinct user groups - internal stakeholders and staff (based in London, Madrid and Singapore), and the British public.

  • Interviews: I designed and moderated remote interviews with both user groups - setting the research objectives with my stakeholders and team, creating discussion guides and analysing the qualitative data afterwards to pull out insights on the key needs, pain points and opportunities across the service.

    • Key research findings included: staff wasting large amounts of time manually copy and pasting data across three siloed systems, processing applications that never converted to sales, applicants coming to interviews with incomplete documentation or not having paid, users not finding out that they were ineligible for the service until they were a significant way through the application process, confusing questions and form inputs led to poor data.

  • Workshops: once we had clear insights on what the problems were I designed and facilitated participatory workshops across the global contact centres and British consulate posts - ensuring I pulled in colleagues from policy too - so that together they could collaboratively ideate what ‘could be’ for the service. This was one of my favourite and most fruitful activities during the project because it put people together who would never normally speak and enabled them to generate ideas for the service that no one had ever had before.

  • Ideation: after the workshops I worked closely with the user researcher and technical team to build on the workshop ideas we felt were most viable technically, financially and from a user need perspective. For internal members of staff I scoped out enhancements for the internal systems to give staff more control over interview invitations and documentation management and amended the application process so that payment would be taken before staff were assigned to process an application. I created a smarter ‘queue’ system in the case management system to separate cases by type and stage which would make it easier to process and to get helpful analytics out of the system. For members of the public I re-designed the application journey creating an online experience that would get rid of the need for emails and calls back and forth.

Design and testing

  • Wireframing: after ideation I took all the ideas that we knew we wanted to test and started to develop them into wireframes using Figma, and the Government Digital Service standards and design library. I iterated them as I gained feedback from colleagues and stakeholders. Key features of the service included application submission, account creation, online payment.

  • Prototyping: once everyone was happy with the wireframes I created low-fidelity, clickable prototypes in Figma for usability testing to validate the design ideas and figure out what was working and what needed work. Keeping the prototypes low-fidelity allowed me to change the designs quickly and easily the more we learnt, without the overheads of getting our developers involved.

Usability testing: I attended and supported the moderation of several rounds of usability testing with both FCDO staff and members of the public across the various prototypes and designs. Working with the user researcher we pulled out insights that I then translated into technial and design recommendations for the team to take forward.

Measuring success

Working closely with our data analyst I helped to develop the metrics that would allow us to measure the success and impact of our work across the service. These included application start, eligibility success and submission rates, as well as drop out and bounce rates - and more. From this the data analyst was able to build a data funnel using systems analytics which the user researcher and I could then contextualise and complement with qualitative data and insights.

Outcomes

We launched the online application journey within 6 months and were able to track data showing that the amount of time and money it took to process each application had reduced. Qualitative feedback from both applicants and FCDO staff implied that they had an improved, more enjoyable experience across the service.

Next steps

Once the project had been delivered,  I worked closely with my delivery manager and technical lead to create a year long roadmap for the FCDO with four distinct projects, each building on from the next in terms of discovery, build and improvements for organisational change.