SSU Verification: A Gate at the Front Door

Summary

Identity verification · Fraud prevention · Sign-up flow · Email design · Cross-team facilitation · AI-assisted prototyping

Product Designer. I designed the verification flow and its emails, and served as the project's PM and release manager.

Context

New carriers can create a DAT account themselves through self sign-up (SSU). Every account has to be paired with a valid Department of Transportation (DOT) operating authority, which helps keep real freight on our load board and fake loads off. The legacy flow had a minor check, but users could get around it, and compliance specialists verified identities by hand, only for paid accounts.

Problem

Fraud keeps evolving, and a check users could get around wasn't enough. When the person signing up isn't the authority's registered contact in MOTUS, the federal registration system, DAT needs that contact to verify they're allowed to create an account for that DOT. That verification is the gate. Engineering chose to reuse an existing pattern in which the authority owner verifies a request by replying to an email with "yes" or "no."

Approach

I designed the flow and its emails within that constraint. I brought Legal and Security into the project and made two calls that came out of those reviews: stating that subscription charges belong to the account holder, and keeping the requestor's name, email and phone visible to the authority owner, with a consent checkbox as the compromise. In the last two weeks I turned other teams' concerns into launch adjustments engineering agreed to, and kept pushing until the design gave reps the visibility they needed into the authority owner's responses.

Result

The gate launched on October 9, 2026, for free and paid accounts, carriers and brokers. In its first weeks, roughly three in four users who sent a request were approved, and nearly all of them went on to finish signing up. It automated the longest step of compliance's manual process, and in the first days compliance reported closing exception cases in under two hours, down from more than a day.

What's next

Buttons in the authorization email are on the table for v2, and a new SSU project will cut the steps before the gate, users' most common complaint.

How I worked

I built the first MVP prototype in GitHub Spark, then moved to Claude. On the vision work, an instruction file and a second agent took a prototyping session from four to six hours down to one. I mocked up all eleven emails in Claude Design, and published a prototype that runs every branch of the gate end to end.