Onfido - Electronic ID (Eid)
Challenge: How to improve the work environment while maximising team collaboration?
Role: Senior Ux Designer.
Contribution: Defined the user model and user interface for core features, Developed core features strategy in partnership with Product Management and Engineering teams, Communicated design intent to teams and stakeholders in different countries, Defined and led user experience research and usability studies, Defined and designed core features for desktop, web and mobile applications from pre to post-launch, Created high-level detailed user flows
Tools Used: Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite (Ai, Ps and Ae in particular), Invision.
Overview: The Cisco Spark Board provides touchscreen capabilities in the meeting room, combined with Cisco’s sleek Video Collaboration room systems, connected up into the feature-packed Cisco Spark in the Collaboration Cloud.
ONFIDO - Electronic ID (Eid)
Challenge: eID specifically is a digital alternative for physical documents, which, where available, is widely adopted and the preferred solution for identity verification. Customers have already started to adopt it as the primary form of identity verification in increasing markets. This poses an immediate threat to the document verification business.
Role: Senior design team lead
Team: One product manager, one engineering team (based in London, Lisbon and Germany), one senior product design lead (myself), one user researcher.
Contribution:
Interviewed customers and prospects for market research and validated needs.
Developed the core features strategy with the product manager and engineering director.
Conduct workshops to define the ‘Go to market’ user mapping.
Produced wireframes and interactive prototypes.
Defined the experience for eID in different regions and validated solutions with customers.
Tools Used: Figma and Adobe Creative Suite.
Overview:
Onfido is a technology company that helps businesses verify people's identities using a photo-based identity document, a selfie and artificial intelligence algorithms. Eid is a green field that was explored to expand the portfolio and be present in wider markets.
‘Should we do it?’
When thinking about SHOULD, this framework is very useful. Should, is at the sweet spot of these three questions:
Is there enough value for customers? (desirability)
Can we do this? How much effort will it take? (feasibility)
Does it make commercial sense? (viability)
Most times, the focus is on feasibility only… Can we do this? But it’s really all three that lead to the right decision. Sometimes, there might be HUGE customer value, but it just doesn’t make business sense. Or it is feasible and, in theory, would be very profitable, but it’s not something customers are desperate for or interested in. And there were A LOT OF QUESTIONS for each bucket. So, the right team had to assemble to get answers.
Above: Desirability, Viability, Feasibilty diagram
The right ‘Customer Value’ question
Often the first question PMs ask is, ‘Will customers buy this?’. However, it was not the right question framing at an early stage. And in the end, whether or not a customer buys it is dependent on many factors. At that early stage, the most important thing to confirm is: What problem are we solving for customers? How painful is it? If you can find a real, palpable problem. You’ve struck gold. But unfortunately, it’s not something that can be asked directly.
Above: The right customer value question
Concept feedback
As a method, I love to pair open-ended learning and questions with concept feedback:
You can have a much richer conversation about it after they’ve been primed by speaking about their problem for a while.
It’s easy and fun to respond to things and give your opinion.
Even though you’ve focused on the same topic, it can surface new and different things.
After conducting at least 10 interviews. I left feeling very confident, first that there was a compelling problem worth solving AND clear on what the right thing to build was.
““This is one of those solutions that can provide a very snappy confirmation of identity that feels safe for people. And gives us the confidence that we are actually dealing with the right people”
”
What’s next?
From a product perspective, ‘what we should build’ doesn’t necessarily help us understand what to start with. I conducted a workshop with the team to map out an end-to-end’ go-to-market customer journey. This helped the team align customers’ needs with different phases within the journey, and through that, we discovered some gaps we didn’t initially consider. Then, we highlighted the needs we would address within the MVP, which, in practice, defined the scope.
Output from the worshop
Challenges:
I encountered several challenges when I started ideating while addressing customers’ needs. One of the most interesting challenges was the selection screen; The screen shows the end user all the options for verifying themselves. Since the decision was made to focus first on countries that have high adoption I suggested promoting eID and showing Doc verification as a secondary (fallback) option.
Three challenges I needed to overcome were:
How do we implement different eID brands within the Onfido platform?
At first, we focused on highly adopted countries. However, I needed to create additional versions for other use cases, such as countries with no eID or low adoption.
The biggest pushback was regarding why we’re showing doc verification (our current main product) as a secondary option.
Although the screen seems simple, it’s easy to imagine how many. discussions I had about it.
Delivery and outcomes
Within four months, a solution that offered a ‘one-stop shop’ for identity verification was implemented.
We supported five different eID schemes across Europe.
The solution was tested among ten customers, and five became early adopters.
This initiative became the top priority for the company.
The plan is to be able to support eIDs worldwide within six months and have one hundred approved users within three months.
