A self-serve identity-verification platform · Case study

Context

Organisations (corporates and government agencies) periodically need to confirm that a person is who they say they are and is still active: pension beneficiaries, staff audits, driver ID checks. The platform turns that into a campaign: upload a participant list, share a link, and each person completes a face capture matched against their government identity record. I designed it from a written concept note, across three surfaces with very different users.

The problem

Clients need to launch a campaign in minutes, watch it fill up, and export records that hold up to scrutiny.
End users are often non-technical, on any phone, and will abandon anything that feels like a form or asks them to make an account.
The platform needs an audit trail: who verified, when, with which photo, and why a verification failed.

What I did

Client dashboard: create a campaign (name, objective, dates, participant CSV with validation), monitor it, drill into per-participant records (submitted photo vs. record photo, status, failure reason), export reports, and manage sub-admins with scoped roles.
Admin console: a client approval queue (validate registration documents and director IDs), account controls (pause / deactivate), and a platform-wide audit trail and metrics.
End-user capture: a no-login mobile-web flow. Enter ID → eligibility checks → guided face capture with on-device quality checks and retake → a clear result. Every failure and edge case is a designed state (campaign paused, already verified, face mismatch, ID not found, camera denied, poor lighting, upstream API down), not a dead end.

Create-campaign modal — Client dashboard: create a campaign from a participant CSV

End-user eligibility step — End-user flow: eligibility gate before any capture

Screen reading 'This campaign is currently paused' — A paused campaign reads as a status, not a broken app

Screen reading 'You've already completed verification' — Already verified: no re-attempt required

Guided face capture — Guided capture: pose steps, on-device alignment feedback

Per-participant verification record showing a successful match — Successful: submitted vs. record photo, masked ID

Per-participant verification record showing a failed match with a face-mismatch reason — Failed: same record, with the reason stated

Key decisions

No account for end users. Account creation would tank completion in this audience; eligibility is gated by the campaign list instead.

Guide the capture, check on the device, let people retake. Pose steps, quality checks and a preview-before-submit cut failed verifications, and the support calls that follow them.

Show both photos and the exact failure reason on the record. Verification gets contested; the record has to make the outcome defensible on its own.

Mask the identity number in the UI (LAG***45). Data minimisation by default.

“Upstream API down” is not “verification failed.” In a flow tied to someone’s pension, an infrastructure error must never read as the person failing a check.

Campaign verification report — Campaign report: exportable, per-participant, with reasons

Outcome

One product now runs across three surfaces, a client dashboard, an admin console and a no-login end-user capture flow, on a single audit trail. Getting verified takes zero accounts, and 8+ failure and edge states, a paused campaign, an already-verified participant, a face mismatch, a denied camera, an upstream outage, are designed states rather than dead ends.

Pilot adoption, capture-flow completion rate, and time-to-verify against the in-person process it replaces are still early. I hold them as targets rather than confirmed results, with firm figures to follow once there is a stable stretch to report.