Background
U.S. immigration is a journey that can span decades, and Boundless wanted to offer services for every step.
When couples get married, their immigration journey is just beginning. Over 20-30 years, they'll need help with multiple applications as they move toward permanent residency and citizenship. Each step is a chance to build customer relationships, and a business that serves families for decades.
But Boundless only offered services for the first couple of steps. When existing customers returned for help with their next step, we had nothing to sell them.
Technical challenge
Significant tech debt meant that building and maintaining basic case workflows used a lot of our engineering time.
Our platform was built with hard-coded logic for each application type, and had no centralized design system. Adding new products meant building question UI from scratch, manually maintaining form mappings, and hand-coding all conditional logic. Government immigration rules can change quickly, and when this happened, our engineers could spend weeks or months making updates to each product.
Opportunity
Boundless acquired a B2B product with no-code tools that allowed a non-technical team to build and maintain new case workflows.
We advocated to move everything onto this new platform. While there would be an upfront investment, there were clear advantages for the future: we could launch and maintain new services much more quickly, and focus engineering time on new functionality.
Homepage
We needed to adapt the B2B platform for consumer use, starting with a homepage that guides applicants though the immigration process.
The original B2B product had no real homepage for applicants. When logging in, they would land on a profile page with a bewildering amount of information intended for HR managers and attorneys.
I designed a new homepage that worked with the existing task infrastructure, while giving applicants clear direction at each stage. It was mobile-optimized (a first for the product) and configurable for every case type.
Scalable layout
Able to accommodate multiple cases at once, and display tools such as the call scheduler
See what's ahead
Preview future case stages to understand the process
Every step, explained
See what’s happening when you’re not assigned to a task
Case review system
The platform lacked a tool to guide applicants and operations through the process of making revisions.
Change requests were easy to miss, request details were hidden, and the process for submitting changes was unclear. Documents, "records" (a special data type), and normal workflow questions all had different methods for making and delivering change requests, and some weren't supported at all.
In the new system, review and revision steps are delivered in the same way as all other tasks.
Customers and case reviewers would receive review or revisions tasks via their homepage. This new review task handles all data and document types, and guides users through each evidence request or prior task needing attention.
A member of the case review team reviews each task, and can flag issues that must be fixed. They can also add new evidence requests, if additional documents are required
A customer receives a new task on their homepage. This new task will walk them through each revision and new document request.
Results
This project paved the way for scalable growth at Boundless, and improved velocity for future releases.
The UX patterns and improvements from this project laid the foundation for a platform that could support Boundless's entire business. The launch was a hit with existing customers, our target audience, and the business could now launch new services in a fraction of the time.