Get Through The Border Nice & Easy!
A mobile app that assists the international travelers to quickly overcome the difficulties & questionable sections while filling out the declaration form of the U.S. Custom Border. It also offers an efficient & paperless process of filling out the declaration forms.
With the spread of the pandemic, many variables have been added to the customs and immigration-related matters.
The US Custom Border and the international travelers are both facing new challenges at the same time👇
At this stage, the atmosphere on international flights is already quite tense, most people would not like to spend too much effort on filling out customs declaration forms. Instructions are needed.
Comparing to the traditional type of hard copy declaration forms, Paperless declarations via electronic devices can also avoid some exposure and reduce the risk of infection.
Paperless declaration through electronic devices is conducive to the standardization of data and information input and would be also helpful of improving the efficiency of customs border protection.
Reducing the risk of the spread and infection of COVID-19 by avoiding unnecessary exposures is also something that the custom should consider about at this stage.
A mobile phone based app that most of the primary functions & features can be used offline
Designed to help international travelers to quickly fill out the U.S. Customs Declaration Form on their own cell phones
Designed to be linked to part of the customs border protection's system
Our team did a brief user research & interview on around 20-25 potential users.
By analyzing their feedbacks via card-sorting, we've come up with 3 major painpoints that they might have, which somehow guided our ideation while designing👇
Based on the hard copy version of the customs declaration form, we simplified the description of some questions and split the form into 12 question cards. We also added some hints such as images and explanation texts to certain questions that might cause confusions. With these assistances, it would be way easier for the users to give their most precise answers to the form questions.
We use QR codes that can be automatically generated as the access to the data of the paperless declaration forms. These codes can be scanned directly by the custom officer's computer or other devices. They could also be scanned by the self-service declaration terminals. Once scanned, the declaration info on users' app can be displayed or printed out as a completed hard copy in a second. This would either avoid unnecessary contacts or save the time of handwriting.
E-Pass app allows users to directly scan their passport info page to input their basic personal information. Since these contents and information might rarely or even never change, this feature could effectively prevent users from wasting their time by manually inputting duplicate information multiple times.
Also, the completed form would be always available for users to review and re-edit offline, which means they could just simple renew the answer of some certain questions to complete a new declaration instead of filling out a blank new form every single time.
Although the concept of paperless declarations was a design goal that was established at the beginning of the project, the original design was to simply migrate the original contents of the paper declaration from to electronic devices without further optimization.
The current version has emerged a better design system and also optimized the design of the forms. The overall color scheme has also been adjusted with reference to the paper declaration forms. On the basis of paperless, convenience is highlighted.
It is an indisputable fact that paperless and contactless office is becoming a trend among most of the enterprises and official agencies all around the world. The current situation of the COVID-19 Pandemic would make contactless more necessary.
Moreover, similar concepts are also being developed by apps such as MobilePassport, an app designed for U.S. citizens to have a quick access at custom borders. Considering that our current design actually expanded the coverage and would not increase the cost of customs declaration significantly, as long as our team can get the opportunity to explain relevant issues to them, the possibility of this design being adopted would always exist.
