Designing for Immigration: Service Design Case Study

Using participatory design to align policymakers on service implementation, reduce administrative burden, and identify modernization opportunities

Immigration services in the U.S. span multiple agencies, policies, and legacy systems, often resulting in fragmented experiences for noncitizens and high administrative burden for case workers. In this project, I worked as a service designer to develop two service blueprints to map out future states of policy implementation and identify areas of improving the experience.

Context

The Department of Homeland Security houses many agencies that oversee immigration to the United States. These agencies include:

• United States Customs and Border Protection
• United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
• Office of Field Operations
• Office of the Principal Legal Advisor
• Executive Office for Immigration Review

Immigration can also involve agencies outside of DHS, like the Department of State, when someone applies for a visa.

Each agency operates with different policies, internal and external systems, and leadership

This fragmentation creates gaps in knowledge, systems, and how data flows between agencies, making the implementation of any new overarching policy difficult. It also increases the likelihood of errors from system or human error that have the real potential of inflicting harm to people who are often in extremely stressful situations.

Design challenge

Immigration processes are often:

• Lengthy and error-prone due to paper-based workflows and siloed systems
• Difficult to implement because policy is created without a full understanding of how things would be implemented
• Potentially harmful to noncitizens when information is delayed, lost, or misunderstood

Our design question:

How might we implement new immigration pathways and in conjunction reduce harm, administrative burden, and system inefficiencies?

Service design & research goals

Our service design and research goals were to:

1. Create shared, end-to-end service blueprints for two new immigration pathways
2. Identify system gaps and improvement opportunities across the entire journey
3. Deliver actionable recommendations to support policy implementation and modernization

Process

We utilized a process similar to the image below to create our service blueprints. This framework guided our journey, but we tweaked a few things in response to certain constraints.

Methodologies

Desk research:

• Reviewed existing immigration pathways and policy documentation
• Mapped current and future variations of the proposed pathways
• Identified knowledge gaps and critical handoffs

Service blueprint:

• Visualized frontstage and backstage processes, systems, policies, and data flows
• Used blueprints to align diverse stakeholders

Using participatory design to shape service blueprints

Participatory design is a collaborative design approach that involves end users in the design process. It helps create products and services that better meet the needs and expectations of users by applying their knowledge and experiences.

We aimed to create our service blueprint by meeting with stakeholders of each agency involved and leveraging their subject matter expertise. This helped ensure that we include our users' perspectives in knowledge development and helped us understand process or system pain points.

This approach:

• Built trust with stakeholders
• Reduced misalignment across agencies
• Turned the blueprint into a shared source of truth
• Helped understand system limitations

We interviewed a diverse set of participants across different organizations including: case workers, senior leadership, and policy experts.

Starting out, we first developed a current state map, by reviewing existing documentation of what the process looked like when it was first implemented.

We then worked with policymakers to build a future state service blueprint where all policy requirements were fulfilled.

In our co-design sessions, we first provide a high-level overview of the map, and then ask targeted questions such as:

Can you walk me through (x) process? What systems are being used during (x)? How does (agency) decide how to process the asylum seeker under this program? How does (agency) document (x) process? What role does (agency) have during (x) process? How will your agency implement (x) policy change?

Design justice activity

As designers of systems that impact millions of people, who can be harmed or re-harmed through certain aspects of the immigration system, we wanted to incorporate a methodology created by the Design Justice Network to internally take a step back and assess these systems.

We used a Venn diagram with the sections:

• Who participated in the design process
• Who benefited from the design
• Who was harmed by the design?

While policy constraints limited what we could change, this exercise helped us:

• Surface the unintended consequences of certain policies
• Make harm visible to decision-makers
• Frame recommendations through an equity and empathy lens

Identifying opportunities

Through iterative mapping and analysis, we identified several high-impact opportunities:

Key opportunities:

1. Digital Interview Scheduling

This would replace case workers having to manually email back and forth to schedule interviews and allow for interviews to be rescheduled much more easily. A digital scheduling system would also help when interviewees need to reschedule at the last minute.

2. Digitization of Critical Notices

Key notices, such as a Notice to Appear (NTA), are sent by mail. This poses a huge number of issues, both for the immigrant who needs to read this document and for other immigrants who are waiting for court dates. If they are digitized, this crucial information could be more readily available for people who might not have a stable home or might be in the process of moving.

3. Support for Foreign Addresses

Noncitizens who are in this immigration pathway often have their forms auto-rejected because the system does not accept foreign addresses. Allowing for noncitizens to submit a foreign address will remove the time it takes for noncitizens to redo and resubmit.

4. Centralized Court Hearing Dashboards

Paper documents are currently used to manage court dates, which include information like what court the noncitizen should show up at and what time the court session is. Lists of court dates and other data are also manually sent over to the appropriate agency. Opportunity to centralize key pieces of information into existing dashboards for court hearing details and updates.

Measuring success

Impact

In an initial pilot of a digitized Notice to Appear (NTA) document, we reduced the amount of no-shows at initial court dates by 35%, as noncitizens were more likely to receive the notice and remember information when the document was digital.

Through our collaborative service blueprints, we helped:

• Reduce administrative burden for asylum case workers by identifying moments in the process that could be digitized.
• Decrease user error and automatic rejections caused by incomplete or incompatible form inputs.
• Inform future policy implementation by visualizing future states in a simple way.

Reflection

• Service design is influenced heavily by policy. Policy is often created without a full understanding of how things will be implemented, which can lead to problems in delivery.
• Language and framing are critical when working with policy stakeholders. Knowing what your stakeholders value and what their goals are can help you present in ways that will have an impact.
• Service blueprints can get extremely complex, fast. We tried to put the focus on where the key opportunities for improvements were, because those were the areas that could make the most impact on improving the service delivery.