U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services: ELIS User Insights Backlog
Goal: Organize User Research Findings Into Useful Insights
My Role: User Research and Product Innovation Lead (Consultant)
My Team: Four product designers/user researchers and one senior developer
Customer Problem: The ELIS program was struggling with a large number of incident tickets, many caused by inadvertent user error in legacy user interfaces. Leadership needed a high-level view of usability insights to help prioritize enhancements.
Successful Result: Since launching the insights backlog in April 2024, we have logged 65 insights (many as repeating themes) and nine are currently being addressed. The long-term goal is greater user satisfaction and a reduction in incident tickets.
User data was coming in from a multitude of sources. We needed to organize it. (Image by storyset on Freepik)
After a contract recompete in 2023, I took on a new role in the ELIS program at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, leading the User Research and Product Innovation track. Our user data came from a variety of sources:
Quantitative: Matomo user analytics, Tableau reports, incident ticket analysis, chatbot query analysis
Qualitative: In-person ELIS clinic discussions and field observations, MS Teams chats, enhancement requests, usability testing, training team feedback, ELIS user surveys, stakeholder feedback
Meta Analysis: Monthly usability insight reports, personas
My goals were to position user research more strategically within ELIS operations, make sense of all this data we were gathering and track our progress and UX outcomes.
Challenge
Having prioritized faster releases over optimization of the user experience at times, USCIS is now facing an avalanche of incident tickets as immigration officers believe that their cases are stuck in the workflow. Recently an Operations and Maintenance branch was created and the branch chief is invested in UX. Our backlog provides one of many opportunities for him to make an impact.
“I want to stress that when I say cases are stuck we translate that to people...people’s lives are on hold because cases cannot move forward and the business is looking for a way to move cases along.””
We researched various platforms that could work well across the enterprise at USCIS, but government acquisitions take months, and we needed to act quickly. Accordingly, we turned to JIRA, a tool already available in-house.
Process
Each enhancement is framed as a user need rather than a proposed solution
Tickets are written so that any team with a designer can take them
Each time a similar insight is captured, it is added to the same ticket as a new data source
When prioritized, the enhancement converts to an epic and all UX and delivery team activities take place within that epic
Work is considered complete when we have measured improvements in the defined UX outcomes.
Below is a sample JIRA enhancement. If additional user research findings support this insight, they are added to the same ticket as data sources.
[Cross-Product Line] As an adjudicator, I want to see details about the case without scrolling so that I can easily validate case information further down the page and avoid errors when I have multiple cases open at once.
Description: Users are having trouble remembering which case they’re working on because they have to scroll up to see the information as they move down the page. This leads to incident ticket creation due to user error.
Data Sources: Usability Study, ELIS Clinic
Impact: Officers spend unnecessary time scrolling up and down to double-check information and risk entering incorrect information. This increases the time spent on cases and risk for errors, particularly when they have multiple cases open at once.
Proposed Design Solution: Prototype Link
Definition of Done: We will know the solution is successful if incident tickets are reduced.
In addition, we are helping the new branch chief collect enhancement lists from all of the business units for ELIS users within USCIS, a process that was previously siloed. A view of all user needs and enhancement requests from the business will help O&M prioritize holistic approaches to improvements.
The ideal process, which is still being established, will allow USCIS to roll out an enhancement, measure for improvements, and then refine or review the data over time.
New Process: Continuous Improvement to Support Business Goals
Results
This process just kicked off recently, but enhancement work has already begun. These are all cross-product features that could greatly reduce user confusion and incident tickets in the system. Long-term, we hope to achieve:
Centralized collaboration and visibility across ELIS
Easier prioritization
A roadmap for scalable solutions across shared workflow tasks
“Lisa’s Backlog project streamlined our approach in identifying, prioritizing, and measuring the success of different enhancements in an organized and thoughtful manner. Her initiative makes it easy for our team to learn and implement enhancements, while also enabling the client to have more visibility on our impact. It also allows the client to easily prioritize what enhancements need work on first and see the measured trends over time. Lisa’s initiative truly allows for us to work more closely with our client, accomplishing shared goals.”