Renew your passport

Design lead

Use your smartphone to take your passport photo.

The passport exemplar is an ambitious project - for the first time people will be allowed to take their own photo (rather paying for one), they’ll be able to submit it digitally (rather than posting a print), and they’ll have no forms to sign.

I’ve been design lead on the project from discovery through to beta. Together with a few other GDS people, we’ve worked in the Home Office alongside HM Passport Office colleagues. We’ve collaborated with policy and operations to make this service simple and easy to use.

User needs are at the heart of this project. We’ve had over 30 days of usability testing in the lab, meeting over 150 users and finding out about their needs. I’ve worked closely with our user researchers, content designers, and developers to ensure the service works for people.

We’ve developed the project iteratively, always based on user research.

We’ve prototyped every step of the way. Our prototype is a heavily modified version of the GOV.UK prototype kit with nearly 1000 commits (545 of them by me!). We’ve used Heroku to test often and fail fast.

The project went in to private beta (real users getting real passports) in July 2015. We’ll continue to iterate it as we get ready for higher volumes.