Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada

The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada is the country’s largest independent administrative tribunal. It decides tens of thousands of immigration and refugee matters a year and is expected to do so efficiently, fairly and in accordance with the law.

I joined its service design team to help rebuild how refugee hearings get scheduled across four divisions.

Role: UX Designer, Service Design team
Team: 2 designers
1 UX researcher
1 PM
Timeline: Fall 2025 – Winter 2026

Contributions

30+Components corrected and rebuilt in the three days before testing

12+Ran usability testing with 12+ cross-divisional participants, ensuring the system worked across distinct regional workflows and scheduling constraints.

Beyond the scheduling tool, I led the redesign of the Board’s internal SharePoint sites, used by 2,000+ employees, and launched an internal AI knowledge series that lifted employee engagement.

Contribution summary

Context

Scheduling refugee claims ran on manual workflows and legacy systems.

The Board’s four divisions each scheduled hearings their own way, around regional requirements and the needs of individual teams. The brief was a single national, web-based scheduling tool that let them coordinate without giving up that local nuance.

Problem

Four legacy systems, and no single place the schedule lived.

Scheduling 90,000+ refugee cases a year ran across four disconnected tools. Hearing dates were negotiated in Outlook, tracked in Excel, coordinated over Teams, and reconciled against a legacy case system that none of the others talked to.

Every division kept its own version of the truth. Finding a free member, a room and an interpreter for one hearing meant checking all four and hoping nothing had changed in between. There was no centralised view of what was scheduled, what was pending, or what had fallen through.

Outlook, Excel and Teams icons in a row, followed by a blank tile with a plus sign — How a hearing got scheduled: Outlook, Excel, Teams, and a legacy system behind them.

Solution

A web scheduling tool for assigning refugee case files nationwide, replacing manual Excel workflows and consolidating four software systems into one.

Blurred screenshot of the scheduling tool with a card reading: This work is under NDA. Reach out if you want a more in depth walkthrough of my projects at IRB.

Want to learn more?

For a more in-depth case study, please reach out to me at nlrdomin[at]uwaterloo[dot]ca

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