Boundless | Lead Designer | 12/2020 — 7/2021
Marriage Green Card Product Redesign & Relaunch
Think of Boundless as “the TurboTax for immigration”, offering immigrants an easier, cheaper and faster alternative to filing complex immigration paperwork on their own. As of 2021, Boundless has helped over 75,000 people get their green card or visa, allowing them to start their life in the U.S.
Boundless’s most popular product is its marriage green card service, launched in 2017. In late 2020 it was redesigned from the ground up, a huge undertaking that required myself and my team to interact with virtually every teammate across our Seattle, Las Vegas and Cebu teams.
Below is a selection of work from this 8 month project.
Project Inception and Impact
From 2017 until 2020, Boundless grew rapidly, but our customers’ satisfaction was low — our service was slow and frustrating to users.
On top of this, to help more immigrants we needed to expand into other immigration services, but our tech stack was cumbersome creating long go-to-market timelines.
Lastly, our platform was inflexible, and each immigration policy change caused months of difficult and expensive product sprints.
In order to survive, both as a startup and as a company with a vision to change immigration policy, we needed to overhaul our product for the next phase of our growth.
My Role
Problems I Was Tasked To Solve
Customer problem: how do we build a marriage green card service that helps customers file faster, with a better overall experience?
Boundless Ops team problem: how do we build better internal tools that help process customers’ applications faster?
Business problem: how do we build an immigration services platform that allows us to scale and build new products from, is flexible enough to withstand policy changes, and dramatically reduces margins?
Contributions
As lead designer, I oversaw all aspects of design and collaborated with our product manager and engineering lead. Highlights throughout the project include:
Determining the requirements and goals with team leads
Leading discovery research with 20+ teammates and stakeholders, and synthesizing and sharing findings
Working with the product manager to prioritize the work and determine the minimum learnable product to launch
Creating workflows, sketching concepts, building prototypes, and designing both low-fidelity wires and high-fidelity comps
Establishing design systems during engineering handoff
Discovery Phase
Research and Sketches
I created a research plan and lead the recruitment and interviewing of multiple customers and teammates to better understand the problems they had with their respective experiences.
The research was synthesized into insights and design recommendations which I used to create early sketches and align stakeholders through workshops.
Product Principles
I worked closely with the product manager to create principles that guided our decision making as we redesigned the marriage green card product to address the problems we needed to solve. Some of these include:
Stage-gate the customer: focus the customer on one part of their application at a time so they do their best (vs. giving them multiple tasks).
Strive for a 0-issue application: guide the customer towards providing the most accurate answers and documents to speed up the issue/resolution process later.
Prioritized ops tasks: our team should always be aware of the most pressing task to perform for a customer, how to do it, and when it’s due.
In-app communications: all communications between a customer and a teammate should happen in-app (vs. email or phone) so we can measure and learn from them.
Overview Of Improvement Areas
Below is the new proposed process for the redesigned marriage green card product, which emerged from discovery. This process allows customers to complete their green card application online, get it reviewed by a lawyer, and then file their printed application to the government knowing it’ll have a 99.7% chance of being successfully accepted.
Within the new process, I identified key opportunity areas that would help us address the problems we were trying to solve. These include:
Workflow Improvements: new ways for the Boundless team and software to function to help customers move more quickly through the process.
Reducing Customer Errors: designing better forms and validations to help customers avoid mistakes when answering questions.
Task Assignment: helping the Boundless team see, assign and track their tasks with better data.
Error Resolution: creating a tool that helps the Boundless team identify and resolve issues in a customer’s data.
In-App Communications: building a way for Boundless and its lawyers to collaboratively review an application and communicate with the customer to fix issues.
Sample visuals of these opportunity areas are detailed below, explaining the improvements made in the new version versus the old version.
Workflow Improvements
To improve collaboration between teams, I created a visual of the new green card workflow and its improvements so stakeholders could understand the user’s journey and leave feedback.
This helped them feel more a part of the product design process by letting them add comments, plus see the impact the new designs had on their teams at the very beginning.
Some improvements to the workflow included a more sophisticated state system that triggered different actions based on what phase a customer was in. For example, when a customer uploaded all their documents, their case would automatically move to Document Review, triggering an email informing them of next steps, plus creating a task for the Boundless team to begin reviewing that customer’s documents.
2. Reducing Customer Errors
The questionnaires customers answered were redesigned to help them avoid mistakes, which sped up their overall processing time and lead to improved satisfaction.
Old version: Through research, we learned that many forms and questions Boundless asked customers were unclear, and allowed too much flexibility. This lead to customers thinking they had answered correctly, and then finding out later they had made a mistake once the Boundless team spotted an issue.
New version: More validations, prompts and help moments were added throughout all questionnaires, but primarily to the set of questions that caused the most difficulty for customers — inputting their 5-year work and address history (shown above). This section was redesigned to visually show a customer their history and where there were gaps. Plus, powerful validations were added to help customers ensure their home and work addresses aligned over all 5 years.
3. Task Assignment
We created a task dashboard that allowed Boundless managers to assign tasks to application handlers, and allowed the handlers to track and complete tasks more efficiently.
Old version: The Boundless team tracked tasks through a network of disconnected tools, like Trello, email and Google docs. Through research we learned how the team prioritized tasks, and which metrics they needed to do their jobs and improve.
New version: The new tasks tool clearly shows which tasks are assigned to each teammate, when they’re due, and high-level contextual info that helped prepare a teammate for the type of task or application they were about to work on. It also prevented cognitive overload by only showing a teammate what was relevant to them, along with a powerful way to search case data.
4. Error Resolution
An experience was designed that allowed Boundless to quickly skim a customer’s data, identify errors and send them to the customer to easily update.
Old version: Previously, errors were caught weeks after a customer answered their questionnaires. Errors were sent to the customer manually using Google Doc templates.
New version: The new experience lets Boundless teammates connect an error to specific data points and send them back to the customer, allowing the customer to go to that exact data point to update it. By visually connecting errors to the data that needs updating, we reduced customer confusion and made it much faster to fix issues. The Boundless-facing tool also gives teammates the ability to edit or reorder how customer data is displayed to reduce engineering time and optimize to their preferred workflow.
5. In-App Communications
To allow customers to directly work with their Boundless attorneys during legal review, we created a 3-way communication system.
Old version: the Boundless Ops team and attorneys used to communicate with the customer over emails, which would create confusing threads and prevent context from being shared across all parties. It also prevented the team from being able to track or analyze messages for improvement.
New version: The new system allows the Boundless team to create a communication thread on each error found to easily let them, the customer and the attorney message each other and share context needed to put the finishing touches and edits on an application before its filed. It also includes a permissions system to prevent internal messages from being shown to the customer, to allow the Boundless team to resolve errors that don’t require the customer. Plus, it can be analyzed by our data science team to show where we can make improvements that reduce and eliminate future errors.
Other Elements Of This Project
In addition to the pieces above, I helped create a tool to generate custom 300+ page PDFs of users’ green card applications, an experience that let Boundless review customers’ uploaded documents more quickly, a new collaboration process between the design and engineering teams, and many other pieces.
Questions? For a more in-depth case study on this project, please feel free to contact me at jfchiappone@gmail.com.