HM Passport Office

Parents can submit an online application to apply for a first UK passport on behalf of their child. EU citizens (who have settled status) can now do this.

The Challenge

My team was tasked with implementing a series of ‘trigger’ questions which would help EU citizens to obtain a passport for their child, but at the same time, not interrupt the current user journeys for everyday applications for new, renewals, replacement and updates to UK passports.

The Process

We kicked this project off by evaluating the current journey for a first child application, to understand where we could look at placing questions to route our users down the path if they were eligible. We also engaged with the UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) department to gain a better understanding of how EU citizens were able to submit an application to apply for settled and pre-settled status.

Trigger questions to route our users

UKVI introduced the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) on 28 August 2018 and after having meetings with both policy and business design authorities, we chose that date (and any date after) as a starting point. We also determined that users would need to answer ‘No’ to the question ‘Do you have a naturalisation or registration certificate?’ and ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Were you born in the UK?’, which were already part of the original first child passport journey.

We also added further EU settled status specific content on other pages to draw the attention of those users in order for them to answer the relevant questions correctly.

Introducing Balsamiq to the team

At the time, the ‘Apply online for a UK passport’ prototype was using an older version of the GOV.UK Prototype Kit.

Making a simple change to a page or introducing a new page could take a few days as opposed to minutes. Even if one made a minor coding error, it would greatly impact other pages in the prototype and either stop working or not route users to the correct path.

I wanted a better way to discuss ideas within my team, so I introduced Balsamiq as a way to quickly mockup wireframes. The content designer and I would present our designs to the wider team and once we were all happy (after a few iterations), I would then create a prototype of the mockups.

Findings and Recommendations

For each version of the prototype that we created, we tested them with 5-6 users in a usability lab.

In version 1 we asked both parents (separately) if they had EUSS settled status and if they did, to provide either their identity document reference or unique application number (UAN). From that round of testing, we discovered that some users were not clear on what settled status meant and some were also unsure of what documents they needed to send to process their child’s passport.

In version 2, we decided to ask early on in the journey if either parent had EU settled status and if they did, they would be presented with further questions (later in the journey) for each parent. By doing this we thought that UK citizens would ignore the earlier EUSS question and not be presented with further EUSS related questions.

We also changed the order of some of the content on the ‘What you’ll need’ page to help EU citizens earlier on with an explanation of what was meant to have ‘settled status’.

Prior to working on version 3 of the prototype, we discovered that the Digital Application Processing (DAP) team who process all the online passport applications would be unable to support the UAN form field. And the only way for EU citizens to get this information across to us would be to write it down on a piece of paper and send with further requested documents. So we stripped back this version of the prototype and asked both parents if they had EU settled status on the same page where we asked for each parents details.

After testing version 3, we felt that the EU settled status question should be on its own page and to provide an ‘I don’t know’ option to allow users to continue on in the journey.

We created a version 4 of the prototype and tested with users at a pop-up research session at the HM Passport Office located at Globe House. This time, we approached EU customers who had just submitted a first child application and showed them a print out of the one page asking the EU settled status question.

The Outcome

From July to November 2019 there have been 152,713 first child passport applications, where 21,951 have answered ‘Yes’ (14.4%), 128,585 have answered ‘No’ (84.2%) and 2,177 have answered ‘I don’t know’ (1.4%) to the EU settled status question.