Role
Sole Designer
illustration → UX
illustration → UX
Digidentity verified people's identities through ReadID — a third-party NFC SDK we didn't control. I designed the in-house replacement end to end, from illustration and animation to the full UI and UX, so the company could finally own the most critical moment in its product: proving you are who you say you are.
Context — Digidentity is an eIDAS Qualified Trust Service Provider on the EU Trusted List, whose platform has created 25M+ verified identities across 180+ nationalities.
Identity verification — the single most important action in our product — was outsourced to ReadID, a third-party NFC SDK. We couldn't shape the experience, the branding, or the cost. Bringing it in-house meant ownership, but NFC scanning is genuinely hard for ordinary people: most users don't know what an MRZ is, where the NFC chip sits inside their document, or how to hold the phone steady long enough to read it.
And every failed first attempt turns into a support ticket — so the experience design wasn't a nice-to-have, it was the difference between a verification that completes and one that lands on the service desk.
EU citizens verifying a government-issued document — passport, national ID card, or driving licence — on their own phones, across iOS and Android. Largely non-technical, operating across eight languages, and often doing this for the first time under a little pressure.
An NFC read can't happen until the app has the document's key data. There are only two ways to get it: make the user type it — more steps, more errors — or scan the machine-readable zone to capture it automatically. I mapped both and argued for the second: MRZ pre-validation, to collapse the steps and take decisions off the user's plate.
Passport, ID card and driving licence each got their own positioning guidance, scan sequence, and success / error states — unified under a single, consistent pattern so the flow felt like one product, not three.
Because users didn't understand the MRZ or chip placement, instruction became a craft in its own right. I designed and illustrated animated guidance showing exactly how to position the phone against each document type — the hand-holding ReadID never offered.
I advocated for MRZ pre-validation from the start. But technical difficulty and limited capacity led senior stakeholders to overrule it for Phase 1 — the directive was to replicate the ReadID steps as faithfully as possible and de-risk the launch. That meant a longer flow and a heavy dependence on instruction.
Replicating ReadID surfaced exactly the friction I'd predicted: without pre-validation, users were left to understand the MRZ and scanning on their own, so the whole flow leaned on instructional animation to carry them through. The pipeline was constrained too — engineering pushed back hard on Lottie, so I built everything in Figma, screen-recorded to MP4, and compressed the files through HandBrake to keep them shippable. And it was all iPhone-first.
Then in Phase 2, stakeholders asked to cut screens and steps — which led straight back to the MRZ pre-validation flow I'd originally proposed. I'm now reverse-engineering toward it. Engineering also adopted Lottie at last, letting me replace the heavy MP4 workaround with lighter, per-device animations instead of one iPhone-centric set.
MRZ pre-validation deprioritised; the ReadID steps mirrored to de-risk the launch. Heavy instructional animation, built Figma → MP4 → HandBrake, and iPhone-first.
The org circles back to MRZ pre-validation. Screens and user decisions cut, Lottie adopted at last, and animations rebuilt per device — a cleaner, more scalable foundation.
A complete, in-house NFC verification flow for passport, ID card and driving licence — instructional animation for phone positioning, the scan sequence, and clear success / error handling — live on both iOS and Android. I owned every layer, from illustration through to production UI.
I built the flow within the Digidentity design system, keeping the three document journeys and both platforms visually consistent and fully localised across eight languages.
Phase 1 was a study in working within constraints — Figma → MP4 → HandBrake when Lottie wasn't on the table. Phase 2 moves to Lottie with device-specific guidance: a cleaner, more scalable foundation.
Instructional clarity for non-technical users sat at the centre, alongside colour contrast, tap-target sizing, and full localisation so the guidance reads naturally in every supported language.
Phase 1 shipped: Digidentity now runs its own NFC verification instead of ReadID, owning the experience and removing the third-party dependency — across three document types, two platforms, and eight languages.
Note to self: add post-launch numbers here — first-attempt scan success, NFC-related ticket volume, and drop-off by step and platform — once the metrics wiki data is in.
With more capacity up front, MRZ pre-validation would have shipped in Phase 1 and saved a redesign loop — and earlier Lottie adoption would have spared the MP4 / HandBrake workaround. The phased reality taught me something I value now: keep a good idea documented and ready, because the constraints that kill it today often lift tomorrow.