Every document, all at once

Reimagining digital documents for a billion Indians

Platforms
Mobile

Deliverables
Design sprint, testing & interface design

Meet the client

A great idea
that wasn’t working

Digilocker was a massive step towards India’s paperless governance. The platform enables millions to issue and verify government documents & certificates digitally, thus eliminating the use of physical documents.

As great as the idea was, enough people were still not using it pertaining to high drop-offs and uninstall rates.

What was the
problem?

Before we got to work on overhauling the app flow and interface, we had to identify the problem.

We ran a  Design sprint  with the Digilocker team, which started with identifying the issues and framing the critical problem statements for the team to work on.

People sitting and discussing thingsParallel team discussing designs with Digilocker teamPeople sitting and discussing
Problem 1

Users didn’t really understand
what Digilocker was

People were confusing Digilocker  for a drive where they could upload documents.

This was causing a major trust problem because user-uploaded documents were not considered valid for official purposes and were rejected by government officials when presented by the users.

Moreover, users were misusing the drive space provided to upload images, music and movies.

Old man sitting and reading papers

showing them all that was possible

Announcements
Did you know
Traffic police across India now accept Driving License from Digilocker
Where can I use didilocker?
1/2

Facilitating discovery before a user signs up

Realising how crucial it was to educate the users on the usage of the Digilocker, we added introductory screens as a part of the pre-onboarding so users understood what they could do with the app and how to do it even before signing up.

Now, information like uploaded documents are not considered valid for official purposes and Digilocker’s documents are legally valid under the IT Act were clearly communicated to the user.

phone mockup showing digilocker
2/2

Verification badge as a trust marker

We added a prominent verification mark to help both users and authorities distinguish between verified and self-uploaded non-verified documents.

digilocker app profile screen shot
Problem 2

Massive user dropoffs
during the onboarding

The drop-offs during the onboarding process were a high 60% and we identified the confusing onboarding process as the primary reason for it. There were two ways for the user to onboard:

Using Aadhaar: Validating using Aadhaar number was the only way to access documents because we needed a robust identity verification before letting users fetch all the documents.

Using Mobile: This allowed the users to set up the app without verifying their Aadhaar, but they could not access documents which caused all the confusion.

woman sitting with papers in her hand

helping them choose better with the power of defaults

Keeping it simple for our users

We revamped the onboarding and nudged the users to add their Aadhaar by educating them about the benefits of adding their Aadhaar and the drawbacks of not doing so through the onboarding process itself.

Now when the users completed their onboarding using Aadhaar, they already had their Aadhaar fetched and ready to use, thus taking them one step further in the journey without any hassle.

Problem 3

Usage was restricted to identification documents

The idea behind Digilocker was to minimise the usage of physical documents by making it a place for people to access all official documents. However, due to lack of awareness, users were using it just to download their identification documents like Aadhaar and driving license.

woman standing with aadhar card in her hand

serving all the documents on a platter

We revamped the home screen to serve the users categorically with different types of documents they could access though Digilocker and even added the samples to what these documents would look like.

As a result, the average documents fetched per user went from

2.7 to 3.4 in just a matter of weeks.

digilocker profile screenshot

How much difference did all the changes make?

280% increase
in 30- day user retention (18% to 68%)

66% Aadhaar verified
up from 54%

“You’ve helped a govt team in “not only catching the fish, but also teaching them to catch fish themselves in the future.”

Amit Ranjan
Architect at DigiLocker

Watch us in action

Reimagining Product Experience with Digilocker: A Design Sprint Case Study

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