In 2016 we helped a client cut the paper visa form from 17 fields to 11 — printing every field, taping them to a wall, and asking reviewers one by one, "do you actually look at this?" Nine years later, rebuilding the form, we cut again: down to 9 fields, 6 required.
This time we didn't ask.
First, 300 Historical Applications
We exported 300 historical applications and tallied every field: what was filled, how often blank, whether reviewers ever opened or checked it, and whether any application was ever rejected over it.
The results were blunt. Four fields were almost never checked: the alternate contact, religious affiliation, the two remaining parent-information entries, and the second line of "cities you plan to visit." The reviewer told us she'd said years ago these were useless — but they were on the paper form, so they stayed.
We also found something else: half of all returned applications contained transcription errors in name, passport number, birth date, or document expiry. Applicants weren't skipping them — typing them off a passport is just error-prone.
Capture Data, Don't Just Remove Inputs
We added OCR: applicants photograph the passport page, and name, passport number, birth date, and expiry are pulled straight out, cross-checked against the two machine-readable lines. The extracted fields can be edited, but they display read-only by default for one-glance confirmation.
Four manual entries became one photo plus one confirmation. Required fields dropped from 8 to 6; what remains is mostly itinerary and contact details.
One gotcha: on some Android devices the passport photo gets auto-rotated 90 degrees and OCR accuracy craters. We added EXIF orientation correction plus a manual rotate option, and anything OCR can't read falls back to manual entry — the flow never stalls.
Drafts and Attachments
The lesson from losing attachments in 2016 still stands: files land in the permanent directory the moment they're uploaded; drafts are stored by draft_id and purged by a scheduled job after 7 idle days. We reused that design wholesale — no reinvention.
There's also the rule from the sticky note: don't delete the license-plate column. The visa form has its equivalent — a "Remarks" field. The system never computes on it; it exists purely for people to write in. We kept it.
August 8
Two weeks after launch, the most visible change was completion time: from an average of over four minutes down to about ninety seconds. That's the measurable one. What we care about more: rejections for "incorrect information" fell, because the four most error-prone fields no longer get typed by hand.
Cutting fields sounds like subtraction, but first you have to know whether each field is actually used in the real workflow. Asking doesn't always surface the truth — 300 old records are more honest.
