Work

Modernizing Immigration Interviews



Every year, thousands of asylum seekers from over 180 countries depend on successful interviews with Asylum Officers to gain a chance at protection and humanitarian services in the United States. In 2020, United States Immigration and Citizenship Services (USCIS) continued to digitize the interview process between applicants and asylum officers. 


Context


Role: Product Designer

  • Scaled product’s design system.
  • Collaborated closely with Product and Engineering.
  • Led user research.

Skills: Product/Design Strategy, Prototyping, User Research

Landed Impact: Integrated country information into a remote interview tool, displaying data from 180+ countries. This expanded product offering streamlined asylum officer interviews and, in part, contributed to ~$600,000 in operational savings and a ~30% decrease in the asylum case queue within the first year.

User Problem: Asylum officers conduct several hour-long interviews daily. Before Global's expansion, officers relied on in-person interviews and fragmented PDF resources. This resulted in inefficient workflows and a significant rate of re-interviews due to incomplete or inaccessible information, impacting both officer workload and applicant processing times. 

Business Problem & Objectives: The core challenge was a growing asylum case queue exacerbated by inefficient, pre-existing interview processes. Objectives for the Global expansion included:

  • Reduce the asylum case queue 
  • Decrease the rate of required re-interviews.
  • Enhance data quality and decision-making accuracy.

Global Interview began as a digital form.

Hypothesis:  Building new features in Global will reduce re-interviews for officers and help USCIS process asylum cases more efficiently. Moving the USCIS toward a digitized process will save time and money. 


Constraints

1.  Bureaucratic: Approval process involving USCIS, The Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations Directorate (RAIO), and IDEA (Innovation and Design for Enhanced Adjudication). This often required significant lead time for design changes and sometimes necessitated design compromises to meet policy requirements.

2.  Technological:  The MVP was built using the United States Web Design System. Although the design system prioritized web accessibility guidelines, it had limitations for more robust software features, requiring custom components for certain functionalities.

3.  User Research: Due to limited time and difficulty accessing users, research was primarily limited to standard user interviews, assumption validation, and observation. 


User Research


Asylum officers, especially those new to the role, struggled to access timely and accurate country information during interviews. This directly contributed to a high rate of re-interviews (approximately 40% for novice officers), significantly impacting efficiency and delaying case processing.

 My work specifically focused on improving the 'Claim' phase, addressing the challenges officers faced in accessing and verifying reliable country information during this stage. 

Design Process: 

To address this challenge, I followed an iterative design process: 

  1. User interviews to understand officer workflows and pain points. 
  2. Rapid prototyping to explore different interface solutions. 
  3. Usability testing to gather feedback and refine the design.
  4. Collaboration with engineers to ensure technical feasibility and scalability.

To quickly address officers' need for accessible country information, I designed and tested a 'low-lift' solution within Global: a curated set of direct links to familiar databases. This immediate step demonstrated responsiveness to user needs and built trust with USCIS, informing future comprehensive improvements.

A 'low-lift' solution providing officers with direct access to trusted resources during interviews. This quick win built trust and paved the way for more comprehensive database integration.

Testing the 'low-lift' solution revealed that integrating data directly from Pangea – rather than relying on external links – was the most efficient and reliable approach. This also allowed us to replace outdated legacy tools that failed to meet Section 508 accessibility standards.

The inaccessible design of the legacy Pangea interface, which lacked Section 508 compliance, highlighted the need for a more user-friendly and accessible solution.


Results

By successfully integrating Pangea's API into Global, we not only provided officers with real-time access to country data but also laid the foundation for a more scalable and user-friendly platform. I designed a panel component so that country information is seamlessly integrated into the Global interface, improving data accuracy and streamlining the interview workflow.



  • Country information feature shipped.
  • Reduced the average time asylum officers spent accessing and verifying country information during the claim phase of interviews by ~15%.
  • Leveraged legacy software API to display data from 180+ countries within Global.


Nick Blake