From paper to pixels
Holiday, work, sport, family, whatever the reason, if you want to come to the UK and you're not a citizen, you'll need a visa. To get one, you'll either apply from within the UK (for cases like extensions) or from outside the UK (the majority of people). I worked on the out-of-country team, helping to transition thousands of paper application forms to a digital site.
Literal piles of applications in a processing centre
For visual design, all government sites must conform to the gov.uk design system. This made visual decisions pretty simple as all styles, components, and patterns were already extremely well documented.
Visual elements like links, buttons and headings are already well documented in government
This allowed me to focus on solving some of the trickier service problems. One of the major elements I helped tackle was the need to translate the many hundreds of application paths into over 10 different languages. This included languages not in written in Latin script such as Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi.
Having to translate a service to over 10 languages came with it's own set of issues
I led a research stream that targeted participants who had recently arrived in the UK to test different languages. We gained a number of insights based on this research, including:
- Many cultures who write with a right-to-left script (such as Arabic) are often used to not having the entire site flipped in the opposite direction, although this is beneficial and appreciated
- Although in western nations a fully digital solution is often the way to go, there are a number of other countries where the internet connection is so poor that often a physical paper application is easier to complete
- There are a significant number of nations where citizens will pay more for a faster service and get someone else to fill out their application for them (such as the UAE or Saudi Arabia)
One of the other major areas of consideration was how questions had to be configured. There were many different paths through the application that triggered different questions based on the user's previous answers. A lot of my time on this project was spent figuring out how we could make these flows work and how questions could be asked in a logical way, for example, making sure that questions about contact details, addresses, and names are always captured first.
To account for all of this activity across multiple teams, we utilized a tight agile design and development process. This included using Kanban boards (both physical and JIRA), fiercely tracking velocity, as well as having scrums and scrums of scrums.
Our physical Kanban board, it was roughly 10ft tall
