Canada nearly put online passports—in 2013
What happened when we tried to modernize the agile way
What’s the hardest part of a passport application?
It’s where most mistakes are made, and the thing that consumes the most time. There are so many ways to get it wrong: Different people need to complete different parts of the form depending on where they were born, where they live, whether their last name has changed, and more.
If you want to build an online passport system, you need people to fill out the form correctly. It’s not the exciting part. It’s not a website. It’s not code. But it’s absolutely, definitely, the biggest obstacle to streamlining an application process.
So a decade ago, a small team tackled the boring, essential part of the process. For six months, they tweaked an online form every week, testing it on citizens until nearly everyone could complete it correctly.
And then the whole thing got shut down.
In the third part of our series on Canada’s passport modernization story, we talked with Lisa Fast, a designer who specializes in human-computer interaction. She was there for the whole thing, and her story is as inspiring as it is frustrating.
If you want to understand service delivery, passports are the perfect case study. They’re complex, self-contained, fundamental to national security, and packed with sensitive information.
Honestly, after completing these three episodes, I feel like every public servant and every elected leader needs to invest the time to watch them back-to-back, to make sure we learn how we can do better:
Part 1: The problem with passports.
Part 2: How Ireland reformed passport applications, with John Savage.
Part 3: Canada tried to fix passports a decade ago, with Lisa Fast.