USER EXPERIENCE, INTERFACE, AND INTERACTION DESIGN
User Experience and Interaction Design
Creating intuitive, visually appealing, and functional digital experiences by designing layouts, elements, and behaviors that enhance usability, accessibility, and user engagement.
The Challenge
The Sterling Identity Network kiosks can be found in easy-to access retail locations across the country allowing individuals to securely capture and send their fingerprints from a location close to them. The system is designed to be guided, but sometimes guides can be busy and people can be rushed so the fingerprinting portion of the system needed to be as self-serve as possible for what can be an awkward process for some people.
Users / Audiences
Almost anyone may need their fingerprints captured for various reasons but a large portion of the user base consists of people working in secure fields like finance, government organizations, and government facilities.
Scope and Constraints
The fingerprint capture kiosk is custom-designed hardware/software that pairs with third-party digital fingerprint capture hardware. The kiosk process needs to emulate the third-party hardware process, but elevate it as much as possible from fully-guided to self-guided.
Organizations
Sterling Identity
My Role
UX Lead
Date / Duration
Apr 2015 - Sep 2020
The Process
I needed to ramp up on the existing system.
I was the second UX designer working on this system, so I started from a live, working system. My first task was to understand it thoroughly. I started by interviewing the product owner and the software team.
I interviewed the customer service team.
Once I understood the process, I needed to determine where the trouble-spots were in the system. I talked to the team of people responsible for phone support to identify where in the process people most often had issues or became stuck.
I outlined problem spots and went back to the team.
I presented my learnings to the product owner and the software team and got the green light to add feature refinement design stories into the backlog.
I started with the biggest issue first: On-screen feedback.
Customers and guides called support when they became confused during fingerprint capture. Working with the software team, I learned there were capture issue codes served by the third-party fingerprint capture device that were not being reflected on the kiosk screen resulting in confusion, frustration, and sometimes people not able to complete the process.
I redesigned the capture visualizations and feedback.
I worked with the software team to redesign the capture portion of the system to included feedback for all issue codes including trouble-shooting suggestions. We also added short demonstration videos that could be skipped for the guided process. The new addtions tested well in-house, so the team made the decision to release the refined process.
Outcomes and Learning
Issue calls went down by 17%.
The update resolved some large common issues and freed up the customer service staff to focus on the next level of support needs.
I learned the value of strong collaboration.
This was not a problem a more elegant interface was going to solve. I was lucky to have a strong development team willing to dig into technical documentation and investigate options along side me to find a solid solution.
This was the first of many challenging problems.
I worked on this system for a number of years, long enough to redesign and reimagine most of the system and I enjoyed solving its unique challenges.
The Challenge
I was tasked to design a simple and accessible method for background check candidates to securely verify their identity with their identity documents using their mobile phone.
Users / Audiences
The app is designed for background check candidates to securely identify themselves during the hiring process, which means it has a wide and diverse user base.
Scope and Constraints
The organization had a priority need for a sharable demo, so I collaborated closely with a small team to produce a polished working app in a compressed timeline. Additionally, the workflow needed to be done on a mobile phone, so a path of clear redirection was required if a person mistakenly opened the verification link in a desktop instead of mobile browser.
Organizations
Sterling Identity
My Role
UX Design Lead
Date / Duration
Mar 2019 - Jun 2019
My Process
I gathered an understanding of the 3rd party verification process.
The backend process we leveraged for the app already existed, so I needed to build a experience around it.
I created a prototype.
Pairing with the lead software developer, we white boarded the workflow and talked through the experience, which I translated into Adobe Experience Design (XD) visual prototype.
I conducted an initial validation.
I desktop tested the prototype by walking it around the office to find the largest issues.
I validated it more broadly.
After I refined the prototype based on what I learned from the initial validation, I set-up tests in UserTesting, a user experience testing service, to test it with a wider set of people unfamiliar with Sterling Identity products and the background check process.
I brought the finding back to my team.
The main trouble spots were the desktop-to-mobile transition and clear and simple graphics and direction for image capture.
We refined and built the demo.
I made additional refinements, did a small retest. Then the developers completed the demo app as I created a series of mock IDs to pair with it.
Outcomes and Learning
It was a challenge to make an unfamiliar process simple and easy.
At the time it was not as common to scan your identity documents with a digital device. I attempted to make the app light-hearted and straightforward to alleviate some of the stress with sharing important personal identification documentation through a device.
Although it's a few years old, you can still experience the demo at this link: demo.sterlingidentity.com. You can use your real id, no information will be saved or stored, or use the mock ID below.
