Simprints, a small startup, recognized unlocking the identification bottleneck could change the lives of millions - potentially 1.5 billion one day. The low-cost biometric system uses people’s fingerprints as identification - resulting in being 228% more accurate and 4 times cheaper than other products on the market that are neither precise, affordable or mobile enough. Thousands of organizations, and governments all around the world are trying to deliver these critical and essential services in education, health, and finance needed to end poverty. Instead of deploying billions of dollars towards this fight, funds are getting wasted on challenges in identification.

In order to be truly effective where others were failing, they needed a design partner to bridge this 'last mile' on the frontline of healthcare to ensure each and every medical interaction would deliver a tangible result. Smart Design, with a heritage of creating meaningful human-centered design solutions that have real-world impact, was the ideal partner to help tackle this. Leveraging Smart's expertise as an inclusive design pioneer, the new partnership strived to design for extreme conditions and ensure effectiveness for everyone, from patient to health care worker.

Together, we implemented a solution that contributes to Simprints' vision of the world as they intend it to be: where every person counts. The result is a seamless identification experience for healthcare workers and patients, now being implemented globally. After less than a year from product launch, Simprints has already reached 20k people across three different healthcare projects in Bangladesh, Nepal and Uganda. Simprints has been tested with 125,000 fingerprints across Zambia, Benin, Nepal, and Bangladesh in urban and rural contexts. By the end of 2017, the goal is to scale up to 10 projects including education, aid distribution and immunization, bringing the service to over 200k and scaling exponentially each year thereafter.

Smart Design involved Simprints in every design step along the way, including feedback across digital and physical touchpoints, and in defining the UX of the scanner and the app through a service design process. The system is designed to be ergonomic, mobile, rugged and resilient, and combines with a seamless, holistic end-to-end user experience that can be implemented effectively by everyone involved.

Critically, we strove not to deliver design, but to guide Simprints on how to make it happen by empowering them with design thinking capability. This sets them up for exponential success in the future, by training the Simprints team on a wide range of new design research tools, protocols and techniques so that they can continuously facilitate innovation for their organization, and ensure the ongoing success of each phase.

After we guided them to define their own design research guide, the Simprints team went back into the field to test the prototypes with local NGO managers and healthcare workers. This time, in addition to getting feedback on the prototypes, they also identified “user ambassadors” within the local NGO teams, which would continue to collect feedback on their behalf after they had returned to London.

In doing so, Simprints was able to close the feedback loop between their team in Cambridge, and the developing countries they serve. Together with prototypes that enabled remote updating both on the smartphone UX as well as the physical scanner device, they were able to define a viable design for the first round of manufacturing production. Not only that, they had established a relationship with NGOs and local healthcare workers that enabled them to create a UX that was not only usable, but engaged them in a sense of ownership of their own solutions.