Their in-house innovation team is tasked with exploring new ways to use technology to serve their customers and expand their business. TrueVisa came to thoughtbot seeking a product strategy, design, and development partner to help navigate an early-stage product strategy to determine if this idea was worth the larger investment and would provide the impact they were hoping for.

TrueVisa wanted to be accessible to all, and serve a large audience—not just folks who could afford a premiere service. A common misconception of the immigration process is that it is simply navigating forms, but in reality, it’s time-consuming, and complex, and is best navigated with 1:1 support and guidance from industry experts. 

Our first project together was a Discovery Sprint, where we set out to rapidly research, validate, and strategize the best path forward. Our goals were to capture real user insights on the industry and current workflow, align stakeholders on the way forward using factual findings, and produce a roadmap with informed recommendations on the UI/UX, tech stack, feature set, and third-party integrations. 

We moved forward by leading collaborative design-thinking exercises, user interviews, and usability tests as well as creating a prototype that was tested as well. It was important to build a deep understanding of the current process and our users' needs and motivations. Through 20+ 1:1 user interviews conducted with different personas, we identified the biggest challenges they faced, their pain points, and the opportunities for our product to remedy their workflow. 

Based on our user and competitive research, we confirmed that the current U.S. immigration process our audience is navigating is slow, expensive, and unintuitive. None of the existing solutions instill user confidence while providing an easy-to-use system at a low cost.

All of our work came together in the form of a few options for an MVP that would successfully deploy TrueVisa’s immigration services to individuals and small businesses. Our Figma prototype was feature-rich, so we presented three MVP roadmaps, ranging from more robust to simple with pros and cons to consider. After discussing the goals for the first version and the appetite for investment, we decided to move forward with a simple MVP for our next stage allowing us to get to market quickly, and begin to grow and learn from a real audience.

We worked to keep the first version simple, and effective, but still impactful and focused on getting the most crucial features created and launched within 3 months.

To maintain a tight timeline, we spent time properly challenging technology assumptions and vetting third-party options to handle features where possible. Utilizing some third parties, allowed the thoughtbot developers to focus their time on critical features that needed to be unique to our experience. Not only did this allow us to get to market more quickly, but in the end delivered an improved user experience because each third party delivered a strong UI/UX through years of their optimization.

As we got closer to launch, we led usability sessions where we collected actionable, helpful feedback so we could optimize before go-live. We found once individuals tried out the platform, they were very likely to recommend it to their network, and our user base began to expand organically.

What sets TrueVisa apart from its competitors is that TrueVisa was built and is supported by the top immigration attorneys and industry experts in the world. The high-value TrueVisa delivers is evident in the success of our users and their positive experience each step along the way.

This is just the beginning for TrueVisa. Their plan for informed growth includes continuing to test and learn from their users and use those insights as the catalyst for their product roadmap rather than relying on external market trends. They look forward to growing their product and becoming the most feature-rich, robust immigration law product in the space.