Study permit journey lab

Immigration, Refugee & Citizenship Canada

Study Permit Extension Form 2021

Designated Learning Institution Portal 2022

Immigration, Refugee & Citizenship Canada, like many departments in the federal government, are undergoing modernization. Dated systems and a reliance on paper applications left the department with extensive backlogs after a series of world crises - Afghanistan, COVID, and Ukraine.

The Digital Journey Labs were created to try and challenge the department with a new way of working. Each small agile, lab would immerse itself in an immigration journey, identify opportunities and plan a roadmap to improving the experience for the applicant.

As the Design lead, my responsibilities included:

Understanding the journey of a prospective international student hoping to study in Canada - including their emotions, their struggles, and identify the ideal service experience
Build relationships with internal stakeholders - Plan and facilitate internal workshops to align business interests, values, and areas for opportunity
Work closely with the Journey owner and Technical lead to craft the vision and roadmap for the study permit lab
Create a research strategy - prepare a plan for interactions with stakeholders, internal (IRCC) and external users to understand all angles of the service and validate assumptions
Collaborate to set outcomes - work with lab members and stakeholders to capture desired outcomes and what key metrics would allow us to measure success
Lead design - concept and wireframe development as well as visual design and asset design
Mentor and support career growth for junior designers

Study permit 101: Casting a wide net

A study permit is one of a few ways foreign nationals can temporarily migrate to Canada. In 2021 Canada issued 450,000 study permits to prospective students. This not only exceeded expectations after several COVID years it was the highest number of study permits issued in a year. Those COVID years left massive backlogs of applications in an organization that had primarily a paper or in-person process.

A lab was devoted to tackling the study permit immigration experience. As one of the first members to kick off the lab, I had to understand the current business process well enough to create a plan for how to tackle understanding the current state of the study permit journey.

Starting with the user

Our first step was to interview Internal IRCC processing officers and their managers to understand the processes and workflows. Once we understood the process from the officer’s point of view, we were able to have meaningful and informed interviews with recently immigrated international students, immigration representatives and international student advisors from education institutions to understand the journey from various viewpoints.

Themes identified during discovery

themes

Permanent residency is the goal

Client as the middleman

Communication gaps

Keeping the client at the centre

We then created personas to share with lab members and internal stakeholders to remind them of the real stories and people on the other end of applications. Journey maps documented the highs and lows of their path, who they interacted with and how they felt through the process.

Seeking inspiration

We spent time looking at the study permit experiences in other countries, comparing and contrasting the pros and cons to look for opportunities and inspiration. We also looked at everyday service experiences that managed to gracefully solve problems similar to the ones we identified during our interviews. We drew on these to then develop our ideal study permit journey - the north star.

dreaming of the ideal journey

Based on our research, we created a storyboard narrative to inspire our internal stakeholders to envision a different future for the study permit experience - where the applicant and their needs are central and they feel supported throughout their experience.