The project

18F was brought on to look at the internal systems involved in processing passport applications, with a focus on the work of the adjudicators who assess if an applicant is entitled to a passport.

In mid-2024 I was the designer on a small team (design, product, engineering, and acquisition) for a 12 week discovery engagement. State asked us to expand the team for a 1 year contract to do further discovery and development, along with an assisted acquisition for an additional contractor development team.

I am currently working as the design lead, alongside a design researcher and product designer.

My work mostly focuses on:

• Analysis of end-to-end service, including creating extensive service blueprints to detail the steps and actors within passport fulfillment
• Facilitation and discovery with stakeholders to define and visualize core needs and priorities of the new module
• Leading the team of three designers in participatory research and product design for initial prototypes

The problem

The State Department receives more than 24 million passport applications each year. All of them are processed by a monolithic legacy system called TDIS (Travel Document Issuance System), which handles everything from payments to adjudications through printing. Each passport agency across the country had it’s own servers and instance of the software, and updates were sent via disc to each location.

There had been several previous attempts to modernize the system. The largest was a 10+ year project that attempted to create a single new system connecting the customer’s application all the way through printing. It proved to be so unstable and difficult to use that it had to be entirely rolled back, but not before causing many months of backlogged applications.

With the successful pilot of Online Passport Renewals in 2023, which was limited to a front-end application that fed the applications into the legacy issuance system, Consular Affairs was ready to take another look at their internal systems.

They had learned the lesson of prior attempts of trying to take on too much, and wanted instead to to go piece by piece, and the idea was that adjudication would be a next logical step.

The work

For the discovery engagement, my work focused on understanding as much as I could of how passport processing happened in the 12 weeks we had.

We approached it with several research efforts:

• Site visits to passport agencies in Seattle and Washington DC, where we could observe first-hand how passport applications from different sources were processed from intake through printing
• Interviews with the front-line staff in those offices, as well as specialists in areas like policy and fraud detection.
• Lots and lots of desk research, digging in to internal policy documents and the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM), which outlines the procedures for handling passports.
• Engaging with research teams in other parts of Consular Affairs, who had recently completed an extensive research project focusing on the customer’s experience of passport applications, which was invaluable to understanding how the internal systems fit into an applicant’s journey

The discovery engagement was also an opportunity for me to coach my team – I was the only designer, and the only one who had experience doing research-focused engagements. I helped shape the path of the research and how we reported on the findings to try and pack in as much understanding and synthesis as we could.

In the final written report, we proposed creating a new module for adjudication, built on a centralized cloud infrastructure.

This would be a technological shift, for certain, but also required significant paradigm shifts:

• Reframing the work in terms of tasks, rather than the (many) handoffs between groups
• Making a digital record, instead of a physical one, the main object in the process.

The report also gave me a chance to share the service diagrams and other sensemaking visuals I’d created, which attempted to illustrate the current state in it’s complexity, reduce it to core tasks, and demonstrate potential changes.

Where we are now

The work is ongoing. In the first months of the implementation phase, we focused on:

• Writing acquisition materials to bring on a partner agency who would support the build and work with us and State in an agile, user-centered way
• Further defining the boundaries and needs of the new service
• Working with technical teams to understand the many intricacies and interdependencies of data sources
• Planning research efforts with adjudicators from offices around the country to support a regular cadence of investigation and testing

As I’m writing this in February of 2025, the situation is more fluid than any of us would like, but we’re continuing to push forward, refining our understanding and testing our hypotheses.

I have learned so much through this project. Tackling a process of this scale made me incredibly efficient at processing the details of all of these interrelated systems. I spent a lot of time synthesizing and distilling and plain-language-ing the details of what we were learning, and creating documentation that would keep the team on the same page.

This work has affirmed my belief that the most important thing in this work is to establish trust with the people who are doing the job.

I can do that best through respecting the expertise of those closest to the work, asking informed questions, and collaboratively building both understanding and hopefully, better solutions.