Client

Anonyome Labs

My role

Lead UI/UX Designer

Team

Sudeshna Pantham

Brittany Keller

Deyge Falanai

At Anonyome Labs, we build privacy-focused apps that help people take back control of their personal information. The lack of visual consistency across our iOS and Android apps, websites, and social media was resulting in poor brand awareness and was hindering it from growing.

We were tasked with visually unifying the brand’s presence to create a consistent brand image, increase brand recognition and instill more trust. The result was a new visual design language that unified Anonyome Labs' design across 13 products on iOS, Android, and web. It also helped increase brand engagement, product adoption and to influence 2 powerful partnerships with household security companies. 

Time for a makeover

Anonyome Labs builds privacy-focused products that help people take back control of their personal information. Sometime after the release of our flagship consumer app, MySudo, it became apparent that no consistent visual ties were holding our products together. The inconsistent design began to negatively affect our business, resulting in poor brand awareness and growth. 

We were tasked to unify the brand’s visual design to increase brand recognition and instill more trust among current and potential customers. After multiple planning and strategy sessions, we came up with a plan to create a visual design language built on these core principles:

1

Design a consistent, modern, clean, and welcoming visual language that could be used across all company products. 

2

Keep an optimal platform-specific experience across iOS, Android, and web.

3

Create a modular, scalable, and consistent design system by creating easy-to-use component libraries for each platform.

The project was a HUGE undertaking and became a company-wide effort. When all was said and done, our new design system played a crucial role in the creation of 13 Anonyome Labs products.

MySudo

iOS app

Android app

Website

Blog

Social media materials

Anonyome Labs

Website

Blog

Social media materials

Promotional materials

Internal items

Sudo Platform

Website

Admin dashboard

Brand Configuration materials

Exploration and iteration

"Your products look...kinda grim."

Armed with gallons of caffeine, we got to work on design explorations.

During our regular user testing of MySudo and websites, we had asked several questions focused on brand perception and how people felt about its aesthetics. Besides being inconsistent, we had gotten feedback that our current designs felt bland, boring, and my personal favorite, “grim.” Privacy can be an intimidating and scary subject for people, so “boring” and “grim” are words that should not come to mind. 

Energizing

Optimistic

Empowering

Along with being "boring" and "grim," our brand was perceived as unapproachable and complicated. MySudo and our other websites felt time-consuming and too advanced for regular people who were not active in the privacy tech space. 

We wanted to create a visual design that felt more approachable and made the complex topic of privacy less intimidating, less complicated, and overall more user-friendly. We wanted to make people feel empowered and unafraid to take back control of their personal information. It was time to use color, typography, icons, and imagery to Thanos snap our "grim" and unapproachable perception away and replace it with something energizing, empowering, optimistic, and welcoming. 

I explored different "energizing" color schemes combined with different component styles.. Our products are relatively text-heavy, so to balance out the amount of on-screen text I played with different amounts of white space with splashes of color.

To give our UI a modern, clean look and feel, I explored different combinations of sans-serif fonts and icon sets. An important upcoming feature on our product roadmap was the ability to enable type accessibility features in MySudo, so I kept this as a top priority.

Sudo refresh

One of the most important parts of this project was updating the design of the Sudos, digital profiles users created to privately call, text, video chat, email, browse, and pay. They were Anonyome Labs’ main offering and at the core of the MySudo experience.

They were represented in the form of a card that displayed an avatar, label, name, phone number, and email address. We had gotten a lot of feedback that the cards were cumbersome, took up too much space, and frankly, a little ugly.

Since users could have up to 9 Sudos, it was important that they could easily switch between them and access important contact information. This was the perfect opportunity to not only improve the Sudos’ aesthetics, but their UX as well.

Users needed to be able to quickly find their Sudos in order to access phone number and email information on the fly. I focused on using typography and imagery to create a layout that would help users instantly recognize their Sudos, as well as a form factor that would maximize the number of Sudos on-screen.  

We took the best parts of our designs and incorporated them into our regular user testing. We iterated based on the feedback and repeated the process until we had a solid design direction to present to stakeholders and executive staff for approval.  

Our new visual design

Colors

Our new color palette was simple and could be easily expanded if needed. The primary and secondary colors were bright, energetic, and promoted security and welcome. With our products being text-heavy, they helped balance out the amount of black and white on screen and added a nice contrast.

Icons

I chose native system icons for MySudo on iOS and Android because they worked best for our needs. Along with being visually pleasing, they guaranteed a cohesive set of platform-specific icons that users were accustomed to. They were highly customizable, consistent, and optimized for accessibility. For the websites, social media, and physical materials we chose Argon because it matched the other icon sets well. 

Typography

Keeping our goal of an optimal platform-specific experience in mind, I opted for native system typefaces for both iOS and Android because on their modern look and feel, readability, developer ease-of-use, and built-in accessibility features.

For the Anonyome Labs websites, social media, and physical materials we chose Post Grotesk, a clean, modern sans-serif font for its readability and visual similarity to SF Pro and Roboto. 

Shiny new Sudos

For the new Sudo design, we took inspiration from the “Sudo” logo itself and added a pair of “Sudo Rings” around the avatar to give it consistent branding which made it easier for users to distinguish between Sudos and non-Sudos inside the app. 

For the Sudo card, we designed a “list view” and a “full-screen view” that users could toggle between depending on their needs. The list view cards worked nicely for users with 3-9 Sudos since they could easily view several at once and scroll between them to quickly access phone numbers and email addresses. The full-screen design worked well for users that only needed 1 Sudo, as well as for promotional images used on the websites.

Let's get modular

All the pieces of our new design language were finished, and it was time to put it into action. I began to build component libraries in Sketch for each platform using Brad Frost’s “Atomic Design” methodology as a guide. This helped ensure they stayed modular, were able to efficiently evolve, and updates could be made with little effort. 

The implementation of the component libraries sped up our overall design process in several ways. We were able to piece together screens much quicker for rapid prototyping, helping us validate ideas faster through user testing. It also streamlined the design of new projects like the MySudo for Android and Sudo Platforms apps since they provided a solid foundation from the start.

Our product and development loved the libraries because they optimized our hand-off process, guaranteed consistency in screen designs, and kept assets organized. Gone were the days of, “Dude, the spacing is different on this screen.” and, “Are we supposed to be using a different blue here?”. 

Using our new visual design and the component libraries I built, we were able to bring these products to life

👇

MySudo

Anonyome Labs

Sudo Platform

Results

Our new visual design system was well received by the company and helped unify our brand across all our in-house and customer-facing products. Our brand perception has been much more positive, and our users have responded enthusiastically to the updates. Our overall brand engagement has increased across our websites, social media platforms, and MySudo, which saw an increase in adoption on both iOS and Android.

It also played a crucial role in influencing powerful partnerships between Anonyome Labs and two household name security companies. We created and delivered high-quality design concepts, user flows, and prototypes using our new visual design system and component libraries, which were instrumental in the finalization of those contracts.