Designing the foundation of an identity ecosystem

The opportunity

Identity capture sits at the start of some of the highest-stakes workflows there are — booking a person into the criminal-justice system, or enrolling someone for a federal background check. On both sides, the starting point was the same problem: fragmented legacy systems, inconsistent capture experiences, and no single coherent foundation to build on.

I was the first pass at fixing that — designing the foundational capture experiences that everything downstream would depend on. In all, I designed four core products independently and four to five more in close collaboration, consolidating multiple legacy systems into unified, configurable platforms. Two flagship examples tell the story: one criminal, one civil.

What made it a hard design problem

Capture sounds simple until you actually design it. Across both tracks, the same constraints made it genuinely difficult:

• High-stakes, irreversible data. A mis-captured fingerprint or a skipped step has real consequences for a real person. The design had to make the correct path the easy path.
• Multi-modal biometrics. Demographics plus a configurable set of biometrics — each with its own rules, sequence, and quality requirements.
• Heavy regulatory constraint. State and federal requirements, accessibility (WCAG, Section 508, ADA), and compliance shaped nearly every decision.
• Multiple users and form factors. The same underlying process had to work for a member self-serving on public web, an operator at an in-person kiosk, and the middleware moving it all behind the scenes.
• Automated vs. human-review paths. Some submissions resolve automatically; others route to a human. The experience had to handle both paths cleanly.
• Precise keyboard and interaction design. These platforms demanded deliberate, precise keyboard handling — efficiency and accuracy mattered down to the keystroke.
• Hardware-aware capture design. Biometric capture is only as good as the hardware behind it. I had to understand the capture devices deeply — their limitations, and how to design the right feedback, capture states, and visualization so users could tell, in the moment, that a capture was good.
• Two very different users, one product. The same experience had to serve an applicant self-enrolling for the first time and a trained agent who runs enrollments all day. Designing one flow that expedites for the expert while supporting the first-timer — simultaneously — was one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of the work.

How I approached it

I didn't design this in a silo — and I think that's why it held up well enough to become a foundation. From the start, I built the work around the people who knew the most:

• Early cross-functional involvement. I brought in product owners, product and program managers, project managers, and subject-matter experts at the framing stage — not after the design was already drawn.
• Legacy knowledge capture. I deliberately pulled feedback from the people who had managed the legacy platforms for years, so the new design kept what worked instead of relearning it the hard way.
• A structured validation rhythm. I gathered stakeholder feedback early, validated midway, and followed up with validation again as the work matured.
• Customer conversations, segmented. Quick discovery syncs with new customers to understand what they needed, and follow-up validation sessions with existing customers to confirm the design worked for how they already operated.

This wasn't ad-hoc. It followed a repeatable end-to-end process I developed and kept refining — from intake and discovery through design, development, and validation, with customer and stakeholder validation built in at multiple points and an agile loop back into design:

Track 1 — Criminal justice: booking & capture

I designed the foundational criminal-justice booking platform that unified two to three legacy systems into a single booking and capture experience. It captured demographic information and a configurable set of biometrics, then handled submission to the system of record and the responses that came back — the foundational capture-and-submit experience, the front door of a larger end-to-end solution.

The core design challenge was sequencing genuinely complex, multi-modal capture into a flow an operator could move through confidently and correctly, every time — while letting each agency configure what's captured and in what order.

That foundational product is now the baseline for a series of next-generation products — including mobile factors and additional capture scenarios — that my team is actively building.

Track 2 — Civil enrollment

On the civil side, I designed across the entire enrollment ecosystem for state and federal background-check enrollments — every major product in the end-to-end process:

• Public web intake — the pre-enrollment and in-person enrollment experience that starts the journey.
• Kiosk capture client — the on-prem, in-person capture application.
• Transaction-processing application — moves enrollments through, handling both automated and human-review paths.

Designing across all three meant holding one coherent experience together across very different contexts and users — a self-service member, a trained operator, and the system itself. On top of that sits an admin and agency-management layer for managing applicants and agencies.

How I delivered

The design was only useful if it actually shipped on time — so I ran it on a disciplined cadence. Working in a biweekly agile rhythm, I kept design a full sprint ahead of development, so engineering always had ready, validated design to build against and we delivered on schedule. Feedback came in every two weeks, against real sprint boundaries, which kept the work honest and the surprises few.

Outcome

Both tracks became foundations, not one-offs:

• Multiple legacy systems consolidated. Each platform unified two to three fragmented legacy systems into one configurable product.
• A foundation that scaled. The criminal-justice capture experience now anchors a growing product line extending to mobile, and the foundational work overall underpins three to four downstream products.
• The enrollment ecosystem I fully designed — web intake, kiosk, and the processing application, plus the admin and agency-management layer — remains the backbone of how civil enrollments are captured and processed.
• Faster, cleaner delivery. Keeping design a sprint ahead of development reduced downstream rework and supported on-time delivery across these products.

And the through-line that matters most: I developed not just these products but the processes behind them, hands-on, before I had the title — and kept improving them after. The craft is how I earned the lead. Today I manage the team carrying this work forward — leading continued development on roughly eight products, including the ones I designed and the next generation built on top of them.

What it shows

Foundational design is invisible when it's done well — it just becomes the thing everything else is built on. These products held up because the design was rigorous, validated with the right people early and often, and delivered on a cadence the whole team could rely on. That's the kind of designer I was before I led a team — and it's why I lead the way I do now.