Boundless Immigration

An online platform that helps families better navigate the U.S. immigration system, Boundless Immigration is on a mission to simplify the complexities of the immigration process.

Context

By combining technology and an empathetic support structure, Boundless has transformed the visa application process from a daunting task that used to take weeks of filling out piles of government forms and paying thousands of dollars to a streamlined process that only takes a few hours and less than $1,500. Through a collection of simple digital questionnaires, Boundless guides applicants through every step of their application, making it accessible and easy to understand.

Despite experiencing nearly 300% growth since 2019, Boundless faced a significant obstacle in their continued trajectory.

Their entire user experience relied on a critical factor—that users were knowledgeable and confident about the visa option they needed to apply for.
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Collaborating with the Vice President of Product and the Boundless internal UX team, I played a key role in developing a new experience aimed at improving lead conversion rates by uncovering the true experience of couples seeking a marriage green card and building with them in mind.

Persona & User Journey

In order to understand the motivations and pain points of couples who are considering applying for a visa with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, I started pouring over desk research of couples talking about their journey. Thankfully, Boundless is a human-centered organization and had already conducted many exploratory interviews with couples that I could supplement my own research with.

Paying attention to what couples were feeling, thinking, and doing in the stages before they decide to apply to a visa (and in our use case: pay for Boundless to help with that process) we were able to see a strong pattern in behavior.
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Many couples could have all the information they needed available to them and have done the proper comparisons themselves, but they still desired a professional they could trust to confirm their visa choice before making the next move: application and payment.

Analyzing the Current Experience

Our hypothesis was that by guiding users and recommending the most suitable visa path, we could help couples gain confidence in the process and eliminate the barrier to proceeding with Boundless.

Through this new experience, we aimed to empower users to make informed decisions about their visa needs and create a seamless journey toward their application.

In order to build for our audience and not our own assumptions, I dug into key stats from our research and c How Might We statements to framdesign challenges in a way that generates more innovative solutions that meet the needs and goals of users.

How Might We...

Understanding our user needs and business goals, we were set up to consider the experience from a place of empathy insight.
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01. How can we create a personalized experience for couples that utilizes scalable logic for Boundless engineers to build upon?

Allow couples to pick their priorities and rank them—now
Create an experience that uses the couple's first names instead of formal immigration titles like "beneficiary" and "sponsor" so that they can envision themselves in the questions without becoming confused or having to remember terms—now
Frame results as “our plan” versus a lifeless output—now
Include interstitial moments in the journey where other Boundless couples with similar answers are highlighted to create a sense of community and understanding—v2

02. How might we create a flexible role-playing experience that allows couples to explore all options without getting lost?

Give them the control to move forward and back in the experience to try different scenarios—now
Avoid “Auto-advancing” on single choice questions as it prevents a user from double-checking their answer and the cost of a mistake is too high: it can potentially result in the user getting the wrong recommendation and proceeding down the wrong visa path—now
Include a “restart” quiz option instead of trapping the user in a result—now
Make it clear that this experience is nonjudgemental—now
Use an “approachable librarian” tone of voice in micro copy to balance the need for being informative and friendly when a user does not know something—now
Use simple, straightforward language—now
Be transparent in detail copy how their selected choose will impact their outcome—now

03. How might we leverage common mobile gestures and progressive disclosure to ensure that all information is available without overwhelming the user?

Provide just-in-time context via click-to-reveal. This will help build confidence and can be engaged in the moment without needing to leave the experience to do additional research—now
Utilize persistent UI elements to help orient the user to their next action—now
Apply micro animations like having all elements subtly fade in and up when the user scrolls into view and grouping elements to appear together as a group rather than completely cascading—now

Outlining the Flows

To build a visa path match experience, we needed to take the complex nature of understanding and deciding on a visa option and make it as approachable and streamlined as possible, without removing necessary contextual explanations.

Moving from task flows to user flows and eventually a fully functional Figma prototype, we sought to create a new evolution of the Boundless tool that would guides couples to a place of confidence in the early stages of their immigration journey.

From Flows to Figma

By architecting the different scenarios prior to designing, we were able to transition to Figma prototyping quickly and efficiently.
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The framework we developed helped us prioritize what screens to design and the UI moments we needed to account for.

Usability Test

Although we had designed the experience based on the stories and data of our ideal audience, we still needed to test before jumping to engineering.
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Moving swiftly, we choose to conduct unmoderated testing with 8 participants to validate our original hypothesis: that guiding users and recommending the most suitable visa path would increase confidence in moving on toward checking eligibility.
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Recruitment criteria ‍

Unmarried, K1/CR1 users
Couples who want to have a life together in the U.S.
One partner is a U.S. citizen and the other partner is not
The non-U.S. citizen partner is abroad
Unmarried
Participants are English speakers
Married, AOS users
Couples who want to have a life together in the U.S.
One partner is a U.S. citizen or green card holder and the other partner is not
The non-U.S. citizen/green card holding partner is in the U.S.
MarriedParticipants are English speakers

What questions did we want answered?

How does the participant feel about their visa path at the outset?
How does the participant feel about their visa path after completing the quiz?
Were there any questions that didn’t make sense right away?
How clear were the instructions and scenarios of the rank question?
After finishing the quiz and viewing the results, what are they compelled to do?
What feels like their next step?

Results and Recommendations

Here is what we discovered:

Only 1 of 6 participants had a clear idea of which visa path they needed before starting this quiz.
Before the quiz, 3 of 6 participants didn’t realize there would be non-marriage-related restrictions (such as whether they could work, or what their options were if the beneficiary was in the U.S. already).
Half of participants did not find the “Check eligibility” button before being prompted, but 5 of 6 participants correctly guessed what this would do.
Half of participants wished that this quiz covered more options than just marriage-based paths.

Our key takeaways to modify the experience:

Allow for comparison: Once people started to understand that any selection would come with limitations, they wanted to confirm that they understood everything about an option (and could compare it to other options).
Briefly summarize the visa match on the results screen: Participants understood which visa they matched with, but it seems like they could have benefited from a very brief definition of the match.

With 4 of 6 participants recommending this experience to a friend,

it was decided to move forward with higher fidelity design and engineering implementation so an A/B test could be conducted on Boundless.com.

Outcomes

See the experience in practice on explore.boundless.com
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Development of a confidence building quiz that dynamically matches couples with the best marriage green card based on their goals and situation.
Creation of a Figma UI kit that is scalable for use when designing all future visa match quizzes like those for travel, Certificate of Citizenship, Child Visa, Parent Visa, and Naturalization.
Realignment of primary Boundless call-to-actions with the updated user journey to reflect a process of exploring visa options prior to checking for eligibility.
Boundless has continued to build on this work by expanding their visa quiz library to include an experience that estimates risk of travel visa denial.

Work done while at ZoCo Design with Ryan Wilson

Boundless Immigration Visa Path Match