Designing an identity verification experience that's easy to use

The Challenge

Verification makes the customer stop, find an ID document and record a selfie before they can carry on. Every step is somewhere to drop off.

The back office and the verification technology were both strong. The part the customer actually touched had never had the same attention.

Verification might sit inside account creation, or arrive by email weeks later. It might be embedded in a client's page, on its own URL, or built in through the API, on any device they happened to be using. It had to be white labelled too, carrying each client's brand without touching the conversion rate.

Designing for high friction journeys

People, not number ranges

I designed personas from research on past implementations, so the team had people to empathise with rather than segmented number ranges to interpret.

Users wanted to know what they were in for before they started. How long, which documents, and a way to continue if their device couldn't cope.

I designed them for everyone who touched the product, including the back office staff configuring the theme, and a set with accessibility in mind.

Users dictated the roadmap

I split the journey into steps, wrote user stories against each and traced them back to the personas. It settled what shipped first, usually the hardest conversation on a project.

Three feature ideas came out of that work: transferring a session to another device, uploading an ID manually, and guiding capture with real-time feedback.

Friction hotspots

Most people arrived unprepared, so the first opportunity was at the start. Telling them what they needed and how long it would take, rather than finding out three screens in.

Then equipment. No webcam, or a device check that failed. Each needed a way forward rather than a dead end.

Then capture, the hardest thing in the journey. I worked out a ratio: frame line size plus video player size gave you the distance someone held their phone at, and those two numbers decided whether it felt comfortable or awkward.

Designing for happy and unhappy paths

Removing the reasons to drop off

Every heading, every line of help text, every word on a button was a chance to move someone further in.

I wireframed the whole journey, not just the principal screens. What happened when the one-time password failed, when the device wasn't up to it, when a check came back negative.

What testing found

The selfie included a liveness check, where the customer read a randomly generated number aloud to prove there was a real person in front of the camera. Testing turned up two problems with it.

Shown something like 33-44-11, most people said three three four four one one. The check needed thirty-three forty-four eleven. The spoken number test was set by the technology, so the only thing I could change was how the number was presented.

The camera wasn't mirrored either, so anyone adjusting their position moved the wrong way.

You can design every state properly and still miss the things that only appear when someone sits down with it.

The Result

Vaiie Identify shipped mobile responsive and white labelled to each client's brand, covering 254 countries and territories with more than 16,000 document templates. 

It went on to become a government approved digital identity verification platform.