Behind the Scenes: Designing a Secure User Onboarding Flow

The first time I worked on a software project where security was genuinely part of the conversation, it felt strange almost like stumbling into a secret meeting I wasn’t supposed to witness.

I remember working with the team on the software. I designed fast, iterated faster, checked in with the developers constantly, and made sure the handoff was clean enough to frame. When the software was finally ready, everything looked exactly how it should: pixels sharp, logic consistent, and the user experience smooth.

Then someone casually mentioned:

“Our pen testers found a few issues…”

That moment stood out to me because it was the first time I had been in a design-development discussion where security wasn’t ignored or postponed. It made me realize just how often security is treated like background noise in the design process.

Why Security Matters to Me

As someone with a background in Cybersecurity, I’ve always noticed this gap. Design teams often focus on aesthetics, usability, and flow but rarely on how secure the journey is. And my own relationship with cybersecurity wasn’t exactly textbook-perfect. I almost dropped out more than once partly out of boredom, partly out of stubbornness, and partly because the only thing more confusing than encryption algorithms was why we had to learn them at 8 a.m.

But despite all that, security stuck with me. Not in a love-for-textbooks way, but in a “why does nobody care about this?” way. Fast-forward to my design career, and that rebellious curiosity shaped this project.

The project i worked on early 2024 was a small and intentional just a few screens and user flows but built with the belief that:

Security shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be part of the design itself.

My goal wasn’t to create a massive complex feature set.

I simply wanted to show how onboarding can be:

• clean

• modern

• welcoming

• and still secure

No friction for the user, no loopholes for bad actors.

This piece is a reflection on that moment the one where I realized design and security shouldn’t be strangers. They should be partners. And this case study is my small attempt at bringing them closer together.

Read the full case study here : Case study for secure user onboarding