Passport Renewal

Passport Renewals is a simpler way for people to renew their passport online. People will take their own photo, submit it digitally, and they'll have no forms to sign.

The new service means that the majority of adults can now renew their passport online. Following a successful pilot in 2016, over 5 million people a year have renewed their passport online using the new service.

Getting people to change their mental model of applying for a passport was challenging. It didn't seem feasible to people that they could take the passport photo at home. People go to Snappy Snaps or a photo booth to get their photos. We were now telling them they could use their smartphone in their living room. To help people we created a step by step guide on how to take a picture that would meet the Home Office requirements. 

The other big challenge was that a lot of users had no idea how to transfer a photo between devices. In nearly every session of research we saw people struggle with cables, folders and lost pictures. A lot of people said "I would get x to do this" for me, that wasn't good enough. To solve this we created a link that would transfer them form the computer to their phone. Once the picture was taken and uploaded it would switch back to the desktop so they could carry on the application.  

We were working in 2 weeks sprints, so that meant we tested many iterations of illustrations, content, user flows and imagery.