Study Permit Extension Application Made Easier

Project Description:

Bravo team applied Human-Centred Design to improve Temporary Resident Program Delivery (TRPD) by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). More specifically, we focused on the Temporary Resident Permit Application package for student extension of stay in Canada. According to IRCC, a high proportion of the applications are unsuccessful due to incomplete or improper filling of application forms. Thus, this project aimed to minimize and if possible eliminate identified problems responsible for the inaccurate or partial completion of the application forms.

To start with, a focus group discussion was conducted with IRCC officers to help discover insights to the causes of the high application failure rates. This was followed by heuristic analysis and cognitive walkthrough to identify the features in the application packages that are working well and are prone to errors based on a set of form design principles. Thirdly, we conducted interviews with seven users (past study permit extension applicants) and seven subject matter experts (internal and external) to understand the bottlenecks/challenges encountered in completing the application package from your perspective as the applicants. Likewise, the subject matter experts were able to share with the team valuable experience on how to avoid common mistakes and best practices in form design to ensure usability and accessibility by all.

Seven common themes as listed below were identified by analyzing our primary and secondary research.
Difficulty accessing adequate information
Heavy dependency on non-government channels and third parties for support
Information overload
Overwhelmed with the application process
Lack of error prevention and validation
Lack of effective communication
Based on these findings, we created five experience principles that address the needs of our target audience and informed our recommendations to IRCC. The key recommendations are summarized as follow:
Short term:
Use a larger font size and style for headers of each section of the forms and instruction guide.
The information Architecture of the form should be well structured to make an applicant easily navigate and complete the different sections.
Redesign the IRCC instruction guide webpage with better information architecture, and search function to improve information clarity, so that it only takes seconds to find answers (to the applicants’ questions) on the IRCC website.
Create a downloadable user manual containing step by steps with screenshots of how to complete each section of the forms.

Intermediate-term:
Online applications will have autosave functions. Only one section will be shown at a time to reduce cognitive load. Subsequent sections will be shown based on the response to previous sections.

Long term:
Study permit extension application forms are automatically generated from an applicant’s GC account to include information they have previously provided for their study permit application.

Addressing these identified problems with the forms and online instruction guide will yield the desired result of an improved applicant experience and minimize or eliminate common problems responsible for the inaccurate or partial completion of the application forms received by IRCC. The improved version of the forms and instruction guide will contribute to the more efficient processing of applications by IRCC staff.

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