Detroit Design & Technology
seeme Mobile Prototype

Desai Accelerator | Summer 2022

Overview

Role: UX/UI Designer
Team:
Kirk Turrentine - Founder and Chief Technology Officer
            Kate Shen - Graphic Designer
             Sarah Whitman (me) - UX/UI Designer
Timeline:
2 weeks
Skills & Tools:
Figma, High-Fidelity Prototype, Iterative Design Process, User Interface Design

seeme is an identity assurance and access management (IAM) platform that allows users to prove their identity in any transaction. It is currently the main platform being developed by Detroit Design and Technology for both B2B and B2C usage.

What's the problem?

The seeme platform’s design lacked implementation of formal UX ideas. Many aspects of the existing design were not felt to be obvious design choices or clear from a user flow perspective. Additionally, many of the app’s features have now become outdated since the initial development of the app, thus leaving more room for confusion with users. Lastly, seeme has gone through a name change and has new branding, and the existing interface does not align with those changes.

What are we trying to achieve?

The goal with this project was to redesign the mobile app interface for DDTec’s seeme platform, implementing new branding for a more seamless user experience. As a newer startup, DDTec wanted to have a clearer working prototype and screen mockups to use when presenting their ideas to potential investors, clients, and users.

Understanding the Existing System

three phone panels of seeme app; white app with grey and blue buttons

After meeting with our client to understand the issues with the current application interface, we studied the former design. There became a clear need for the branding guidelines to be implemented. For example, the above images show several different color schemes. Throughout this process, we began to understand which features and screens had now become obsolete.

We also pinpointed several key screens with interfaces that were confusing as designers, thinking about how it would cause confusion for users. For example, on the far left we see a list of document categories in an unspecified order. The second image shows a subcategory of health documents that does not entirely clarify still what type of document to upload. The farthest right image shows how proximity of text to image can cause unnecessary confusion over what an icon's use is.

As someone who was an outsider to both the identity verification space and the blockchain space, I took the liberty of scheduling multiple sessions with the founders to really get thorough explanations on the intention of the app and how the whole process worked.

Implementing Branding

Something that we did next in our process was take the existing screens and mock them up as-is in the existing flow, but with the newly provided brand guidelines. We did this step as an experiment to see if perhaps aspects of the existing user flow did in fact make sense, when designed with a more consistent design structure. However, we found from this step that there were still categorical and flow issues, despite an improved UI experience.

Prototype

After our process to improve the UI, we consulted with our client, and developed a new proposed user flow and created a high fidelity prototype. As stated prior, we limited the color palette to be in coordination with the improved branding guidelines provided to us by DDTec.

To improve the overall experience of navigating the app, we implemented a more simplified categorization system for uploading documents. Instead of having a user navigate to a category - and potentially incorrectly guess which category a document falls under - we listed out the possible document types available for upload. This makes it clear upfront what a user can upload and takes the guesswork away from the user, making the process more streamlined.

We also built out the onboarding and profile sections of the interface to create the full experience a user would have navigating the seeme app.

video walk through of seemee app

What do users think?

DDTec is an early stage startup with a two founders and few users, so unfortunately we didn't have a large database of users to pull feedback from. However, in attempt to get more opinions outside of the design team, we incorporated continual feedback from our startup accelerator of 4 other technology startups, as well as other colleagues in the office.

Reflection

One of my biggest takeaways with this project is the importance of understanding a project holistically. Many times I found myself asking the founders questions about the intended action of a section on the app or a bigger question relating to the business model. I wanted to fully understand the project that I was working on. Although some of the questions may not have directly related to the UX/UI improvements of the app, it felt important to me as a designer to not be working on a project where I was left confused as to its purpose. In turn I learned intricacies about blockchain, which seeme uses to strengthen identity verification; I learned about dealing with a business that is both B2B and direct to consumers. This was also found to be mutually beneficial to the founders as well, because they were learning to explain their business at a more elementary level rather than the technical side of things - as I was entirely new to the industries and technologies their platform was utilizing.

This project really challenged me to streamline the UX and prioritize what actions a user would need most readily. With more time on this project, I would have liked to build out a more robust interaction map with a tool like Miro to really understand the user flow prior to designing it in Figma. DDTec was able to develop their future app updates based off of our prototype.

As stated prior, we had an experimental phase of incorporating new branding into the existing user flow. Although this was ultimately not very successful, I think it was an interesting strategy to try, and sometimes you do not know what will work until you fail at it, whilst still learning something from the process.