Product Design · Identity · Mobile App
A privacy-first identity platform. I led design and research on a team of four. The defining call: we cut two of our own AI features, a document scanner and a file-reading assistant, once research showed the real blocker was trust, not convenience.
Problem Identification
For students, verifying identity had become a privacy risk to brace for, not a routine task.
"I've uploaded my passport to so many different portals. I never know who actually sees it or how it's stored. Every new system feels like a privacy risk."
Verification is fragmented and opaque: multiple logins, inconsistent requirements, vague privacy policies. Users feel exposed rather than protected.
User Research
Students described learned helplessness: burned so many times they'd stopped trusting any system. One told me, "I just assume every portal is going to leak my data eventually." That distrust became the problem Nox+ was designed to solve.
Design Process
The version that worked organized the app around the moment of verification, not document storage.
V1 treated Nox+ as a document vault (upload, store, retrieve), but storage alone didn't solve the trust problem. V2 added transparency panels, which tested better but felt overwhelming. V3 was the reorganization around the moment of verification, and it was the one that held up in testing.
I delegated screens across the team and held consistency through regular critiques, translating the research into the app's information architecture: the identity home, documents, history, and family access.
Design Decisions
Each call traded a nice-to-have for the one thing Nox+ had to protect: trust.
A vault made storage the main event, but transparency panels on that screen added cognitive load to a moment that should feel automatic. I made the home surface what's being asked for, with security signals visible at the moment of share, and moved storage to a secondary surface.
Lost a clean "manage everything from one screen" hierarchy. Accepted because the research described identity as reactive, not planned.
Research kept surfacing the same finding: users felt exposed when their full passport was displayed on-screen, even before sharing. The most accurate preview was also the one that triggered the anxiety we were trying to solve. I made redacted preview the default (only the requested field visible) with "show full" one tap away, controlled by the user.
An extra tap for at-a-glance confirmation. Accepted because the discomfort signal was stronger than the friction signal.
An AI document scanner and an assistant with access to your files were strong pitches. Both expanded the trust surface area, exactly the thing Nox+ existed to shrink. I cut both for V1 and held the line at biometric setup, document management, the Nox+ card, transparency panels, and family access.
Less differentiation in a pitch deck. But every cut feature would have diluted the core promise.
Solution
Prove who you are without putting your full document on screen, or in anyone else’s hands.
Nox+ is built on a simple premise: people don't want to manage their identity, they want to forget about it until they need it. Every feature answers the question participants kept asking: “Who has my data, and can I trust them?”
The final designs, screen by screen.
Validation
Every round asked one question: do people trust this?
21-page handbook · open PDF →
Systems Thinking
Four states carry the trust: the first run, the unlocked card, a document about to lapse, and access shared with family.
Live Prototype
The whole flow end to end: onboarding, biometric setup, and a verification that never puts the document on screen.
Prototype Walkthrough · silent screen recording
Reflection
The hardest part of leading this wasn't the design itself. It was prioritization. With four people and a 10-week build inside the term, every yes to a feature was a no to two others. Saying no to good ideas, especially my own, was the work.
Apple's Digital ID launched in November 2025 while we were still building Nox+: the same trust problem, now surfacing in the world's largest consumer ecosystem. It didn't validate our specific design, but it was a good sign we'd read the problem right.
With more time, I'd push beyond students. The same verification anxiety hits immigrants, elderly people managing healthcare documents, and gig workers. Testing with those groups would show whether our trust-first framework holds across audiences.
Thanks for reading
My one-page resume, or reach me directly.
