Streamlining Asylum Interviews
Quick Summary
Global Interview is a desktop tool used by U.S. asylum officers to process interviews that determine whether individuals qualify for legal protection.
I designed new features to streamline workflows and reduce the case backlog. My work focused on embedding country information and note-taking ability directly into the interview experience, which supported faster decision-making and more efficient processing.
Impact Highlights
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Transformed an underutilized app into a daily-use decision-support tool
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84% user adoption
- 180+ countries of reference data embedded in the interface
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30% reduction in asylum case backlog within one year of adoption
- $600K in savings by preventing social distancing delays
Team & Timeline
Over the course of four months, I collaborated with an agile team of 5 engineers, one designer, and a product manager.
Problem
Global Interview was originally built to digitize asylum workflows, but functionality was limited to data intake and form management. Officers had to rely on outside tools and databases, leading to:
- Time-consuming searches for country info searches
- Disorganized note-taking
- Missed opportunity to fully support interview workflows
Goals
- Increase adoption by positioning Global as a centralized workflow tool
- Minimize Officer reliance on external research tools
- Improve decision-making by enhancing data quality and usability
Design Process
Research
By observing live Asylum interviews and conducting user interviews with Asylum Officers myself, I gained insights into their workflow and pain points. During interviews, officers must be informed on current events and country-specific details, while also documenting comprehensive notes to review and make decisions on cases.
I discovered that, due to Global Interview’s limited functionality, over 60% of Officers would leave the platform during a live interview to consult external tools for country information and note-taking.
Officer context switching not only disrupted their workflow, but also led to significant time lost, which results in additional costs for USCIS such as interpreter fees and extra administrative work.
Defining Features
We needed to design features that would make Global the single source of truth for Officers, reduce context switching, and increase adoption. My research and synthesis steered the team towards two key solutions: standardizing note-taking and integrating country information into the Global interface.
Recognizing that officers were already supplementing Global with tools like Pangea to compensate for its lack of country information, I collaborated with engineers to explore the feasibility of directly incorporating Pangea's country report summaries into Global’s interface. Despite Pangea's outdated design patterns, its data remained a valuable resource.
Wireframes
I designed a new country information component for Global’s design system. The goal was to displaying only essential data points pulled from Pangea. An edge case was brought to my attention regarding lengthy country reports, so I designed a way to expand or collapse reports so that the data will load quickly, and limit coginitive load for Asylum Officers.
We knew Officers needed to record questions and answers, so I designed a note-taking component to document answers clearly. Because the screen was agoing to be dense with data, I alternated colors to make it easier for users to visually track across rows without losing their place.
User Testing
To validate our design decisions, I created an assumption tracking framework that guided our ongoing collaboration with Asylum Officers. Rather than conducting one formal testing phase, we engaged with 8 Officers across different experience levels in regular feedback sessions throughout development due to our tight timeline.
Key assumptions we tracked included:
- Officers would prefer seeing summarized country data vs comprehensive reports
- Alternating row colors would improve note-taking accuracy during rapid interviews
- The positioning of country information would reduce context-switching
Results from validation:
- 7 out of 8 Officers confirmed our core information architecture met their workflow needs
- The row design in the note-taking component received unanimous positive feedback
- Officers estimated they could save 12-15 minutes per interview with the new interface
Asylum Officer: "Having the country information positioned where you've placed it addresses exactly what slows me down during interviews."
This validation approach allowed us to maintain development momentum while ensuring our solution addressed real user needs. By tracking our assumptions rather than implementing major post-testing revisions, we could meet urgent deployment timelines while still delivering a user-centered solution.
Impact and Reflection
Prior to this work, Global Interview was not widely adopted by Asylum Officers due to its reliance on external tools and limited in-app functionality. By designing integrated country information and note-taking features, we significantly increased the tool’s utility and usability.
As a result, Global became a central part of the Officer workflow, especially during COVID-related shifts to remote interviewing. These updates led to an 84% adoption rate within one year, and contributing to a 30% reduction in the asylum case queue and $600,000 in savings.
Looking back, I would have liked to explore personalizing country information based on the applicant's circumstances rather than solely their location. Reports could be tailored to relevant factors like demographic characteristics, profession, or the nature of their asylum claim, creating a more nuanced information foundation for Officers. However, with my contract limited to just four months, we prioritized core functionality that would deliver immediate value while meeting urgent adoption needs during the pandemic.