SafeScan
People scan documents at the worst moment of whatever process they're in. I redesigned a scanning app's core flows for that person - stressed, not calm.
The problem
The app I audited was missing basic UX: red alert banners, pop-ups that trap you in a binary choice, a Delete button a thumb's width from primary navigation. And nobody scans a document because they feel like it - the user is rarely calm to begin with.
So I designed against SAMHSA's trauma-informed care principles - the U.S. agency that wrote them for health services, not software. Six principles; two translate almost directly.
No research, no participants, no testing - worth saying plainly, given the subject. The audit below holds regardless of who the user is; the emotional-design choices that follow are reasoned, not validated.
no sudden movement, no ambiguous states.
doing. Unpredictability removes control.
What was wrong with the original
I ran a heuristic evaluation against Nielsen's ten usability heuristics before designing anything. Five failed clearly enough to be worth fixing.
Visibility of system status
"Sorting Document" as static text, no progress indicator - you can't tell if it's working or frozen.
User control and freedom
Pop-ups force a binary choice with no way to dismiss by tapping outside.
Error prevention
Delete sits beside the primary navigation, relying on a warning instead of safe placement.
Recognition rather than recall
No indicator of open tasks - you have to remember what you've already scanned.
Aesthetic and minimalist design
Decoration takes roughly a third of the screen, pushing the primary action below the fold.
The redesign
The redesign moves the work from error recovery to error prevention - and moves as much of it as possible off the user entirely.
Invisible tech
Alignment and lighting correction happen in the background. Configuration is a decision, and decisions are what a stressed person has least of.
The Sunrise screen
The app opens on one action instead of a dashboard of alerts. Fewer options, faster decision (Hick's Law) - and the entry point sets the tone for everything after it.
Darkroom capture
During scanning the interface dims everything except the document. Less visual noise, and it makes the act feel private.
The breathing loop
A spinner only tells you time is passing. A slow expanding circle plus plain status text - Aligning… Enhancing… - says the wait is working for you.
Key decisions
Calm over informative
A spinner is uninformative; a progress bar is informative but promises a duration it may not keep. I chose a breathing circle with plain status text.
It tells you the system is alive, not how long you'll wait. Fine for a two-second scan. For a slow one, a user who can't tell whether thirty seconds is normal is back in the uncertainty the design set out to remove.
No Red
Trauma-informed design says avoid aggressive color, and alert red is the most aggressive signal in the standard palette. So it's out.
In the saved-documents list, however, Delete and Share still sat side by side with zero confirmation for the destructive action. It's a quieter version of the failure I flagged in the original app.
Where it stands
SafeScan is an interactive prototype. The flows are designed and clickable; nothing was built, and nobody has used it under the conditions it was designed for.
Test it with people who are actually stressed. Every choice here is reasoned from a framework, and a framework can only tell you what should help. Whether a breathing circle is reassuring or patronising mid-insurance-claim is an empirical question, and I answered it from an armchair.
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