How the U.S. Department of State turned a 40-minute paper process into a 10-minute digital one

Renewing a passport used to be an ordeal. Fill out a printed form by hand, track down a vendor that takes passport photos, write a check (assuming you remembered your checkbook existed!), and mail the whole bundle off with your current passport, hoping you got back what you needed before your trip. For many Americans, that meant a multi-day scavenger hunt spread across a busy week, all to complete a form that only took about forty minutes once you had everything ready to fill it out.

The Department of State (State) Bureau of Consular Affairs decided that Americans deserved a better, more efficient process. Today, renewing a passport online can take about ten minutes, and can be completed in a phone’s web browser from your own couch, thanks to the Bureau's Online Passport Renewal (OPR) digital application form. But getting there took four years and a willingness to keep listening and improving even after the online tool was already in use by millions of Americans.

Key Results

As of September 2026:

• Renewals completed through OPR: approximately 9 million
• Share of all passport renewals now completed digitally: more than half
• Customer burden eliminated: more than 4 million hours since 2022
• Reported customer satisfaction: above 90%

A passport process built for a different era

In the 1990s, just 5% of Americans held a passport. Today it i's nearly half, and demand keeps climbing. But the Bureau of Consular Affairs was still relying on a process from a bygone era: paper forms, printed photos, paper checks, and documents mailed in—, then a wait. Every point in that process was a place where things could go wrong, from a printer low on toner to a photo that wasn’t quite right.

The reliance on snail mail to communicate where there was a problem was also a failure point. There could be weeks of back-and-forth for a missing signature or a needed photocopy. Getting real-time signals from customers when they first ran into trouble wasn't a nice-to-have, it was the only way to catch problems before they turned into delays that could ruin a planned trip abroad.

Fixing the experience meant understanding every inefficiency and eliminating it. As the team built OPR, it would be key to know where customers were getting stuck and to get them back on track quickly.

How the Bureau of Consular Affairs collected customer feedback

The team built a single feedback survey for OPR and kept adjusting the questions over time to pinpoint where customers were struggling.

The first version of the survey went out to customers weeks after they'd received their new passport, but by then, customers’ memories were hazy on the details of the process and any pain points. The survey surfaced some useful signals, mostly about processing and mailing timelines — but these elements were largely things that could be changed. What the team wanted was information about the online renewal experience itself, something it could actually act on quickly.

To get better information from customers, the team began sending the survey earlier in the process, triggering it when a customer started an online renewal but hadn't logged back in for two weeks. Using Qualtrics text analytics to group sentiment by topic, this version gave the team its first clear, structured picture of a specific usability problem for some customers: uploading a digital passport photo. The photo-upload findings prompted deeper investigation into that step of the process.

To identify and head off small problems before they could become bigger ones, the team continued to move the trigger point for feedback earlier in the process. Today the survey fires right after a customer completes payment, the final step in the application process. It asks specifically how they obtained their photo, whether they took it themselves, had a friend help, or used a photo store or business.

Even the latest iteration is only seen by people who finish the process. To hear from the ones getting stuck midway during the photo upload portion, the team added a second trigger to the same survey instrument, a follow-up prompt that fires when a customer fails three or more times to upload a photo. Imagine the moment: a customer has cropped and re-uploaded the same photo three times and is about to give up when a short prompt appears asking what happened. Their answer is shared with the product team while the frustration is still fresh, giving product and development teams the details they need to understand what’s happening and set immediate priorities on what to adjust in the photo tool.

Turning insight into action: Why passport photo uploads were failing — and what changed

The data showed that about 30% of customers who had their photo taken at a store or business reported a smoother experience and fewer errors than customers who took the do-it-yourself approach. But customers of one major photo vendor were more likely to have problems. That split pointed to two distinct problems, each one worth solving.

1. Internally, the passport team combined the failed-upload error codes with the survey responses and handed that dataset to the product team, giving them clear priorities for what to fix in the do-it-yourself photo tool.
2. Externally, armed with the same satisfaction data, the team met directly with photo vendor executives and suggested ways to improve their training materials for employees who capture photos in stores, so those photos would consistently meet Department requirements. The team also recommended additional guidance for photo customers themselves, to help ensure the photos they received would be submitted and accepted correctly.

Together, the two efforts moved the numbers. Error rates tied to background, head position, and image quality — most of them by the do-it-yourself customers — fell by nearly 50% within a matter of months. Photo upload time for customers using a vendor-provided photo dropped from more than 10 minutes to roughly 5 minutes on average.

What ten minutes adds up to

Approximately 9 million Americans have now renewed their passports through OPR, and more than half of all renewals today are completed digitally. The shift from a 40-minute paper process to a 10-minute online one has eliminated more than 4 million hours of collective customer burden since 2022. Customers themselves rate the experience highly, reporting satisfaction above 90%!

This transformation story got national attention. Media outlets reported that the agency had "pulled off the impossible" by making passport renewal simple, compared the new experience to the ease of ordering takeout, and walked readers through a process that, for some applicants, took as little as six minutes. (Citations below.)

Extending the feedback model to the travel.state.gov redesign

The same feedback philosophy has now been extended to travel.state.gov, one of the federal government's most-visited websites and the starting point for most Americans researching passport requirements. As a high impact service provider (HISP) — a designation used by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for federal programs with the largest and most critical public-facing footprints — the Bureau was already required to collect feedback on the site. But, that data arrived quarterly from a limited sample, and comments were often too vague to act on. The redesign changes that.

"With the reimagining of our website," Larrimore said, "we've now built a feedback button into every one of the redesigned pages... and we combine their feedback with automatically captured data like what page they were on and what type of device they were using, which helps us understand and pinpoint problems."

Since the redesigned passport section went live in May of 2026, customers have let the team know about broken links, confusing wording, and bugs specific to certain mobile phones. Combined with automatically captured data about the page and device, those reports let the team fix issues quickly.

The team is also exploring passive behavioral signals to better understand the silent majority of customers who don't respond to surveys, but whose experience still matters.

As Siegmund put it: "This is the power of listening to your customers. Qualtrics gave us the tools to analyze the data and help others understand its meaning. But then we had to act on the data to implement change, by making requirements easier to understand, simplifying the tool, and meeting directly with the businesses who take photos. That's what made a real difference."

Citations

• Cohen, Ben. 2025. “America Has Pulled Off the Impossible. It Made Getting a Passport Simple..” The Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/business/us-passport-online-renewal-e58b51d1. ↩
• Butler, Peter. 2026. “How to Renew Your Passport Online Without a Trip to the Post Office.” CNET. September 13, 2026. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/need-to-renew-your-us-p…. ↩
• Compton, Natalie B. 2026. “It Takes Only Six Minutes to Renew Your Passport. Here’s How..” The Washington Post. The Washington Post. February 18, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/passport-renewal-online. ↩