Customer Map of renewing Indian passport in tatkal process

Documenting a personal experience of how I gave up on tatkal process.

I documented my journey of the failed attempt to show the pain and frustration of the long journey. This is an attempt to drive the point how information design of a citizen services’ website plays an important role in the overall experience of the citizens.

I recently got my passport renewed after a couple of failed attempts. I had initially planned on utilising the Tatkal process to get my passport renewed in time to travel to Singapore to speak at an international UX conference. This is my journey of how I had given up on the tatkal process and gave up on the speaking opportunity.

Tatkal is an sanskrit word, which means ‘instant’. A tatkal process allows citizens to book an appointment slot on short notice for emergency cases to obtain or renew a passport

The journey map shows the ideal process and my actual journey of deviations from the ideal process.

This painful journey could have been avoided if only two pieces of information was provided upfront at the appropriate places on the passport authority website.

1. Information about when to book tatkal appointment slots: Since there is a huge demand for appointment slots, they had decided to open slots to book an appointment 2 days prior at a specific time. Since they also did not want everyone applying from the entire country to be logged onto the website at the same time, they had different time slots for different cities. For example, on 6PM every day citizens in Bangalore can book their tatkal appointment. I just hope there was a better and easier way to allow citizens from everywhere book a slot without website being down or facing performance issues. To start with they should make this information available about the time slots near the place where users select the tatkal process for their passport application and also in the about the process sections.
2. Information regarding required documentation: This information is presented along with the application form and as a pdf in a different section of the website. This is just too hard to follow the tables provided in the pdf. Moreover the information provided about the instant process is just wrong. They should update this information upfront in the about the process steps, which would make the citizens trying to avail the service make a better decision.

The website itself talks about the process of booking the appointment and there are video resources that talk about what would happen at the passport office for document verification. There could be a section on the website that talks about the process holistically and not just how to use the website.

That said, the whole process of passport services has been updated recently and it has brought a lot of transparency to the process. After this failed attempt, I booked a fresh appointment under the normal category. I had an appointment 4 weeks from the date of booking and once I visited the passport office for documents verification, I received my passport in two weeks. It was fairly simple and straight forward process.

This post is part of the UX4India series, I plan to publish every week, with my journeys and UX issues encountered on Indian Service Websites (most of which will be Govt services).