Helping trans people through their name change journey

THE PROBLEM

Namesake has been built to help LGBTQ people change their name and gender marker.

Luke, Namesake’s CEO changed his name and gender marker a few years ago and struggled through the United States’ complicated process.

Luke approached the Mokutan team with an idea of how tech could be used to help individuals who were going through the process to have a smoother journey than the one he did.

Essentially the aim of the app was to collect the information that most of the forms throughout the process asked for, i.e. Old Name, New Name, Date of Birth and then pre-fill the majority of each form for the users.

HOW WE DEVELOPED THEIR SOLUTION

Scoping

During scoping our aim was to build a clear vision of the future Namesake product.

The minimum viable product aimed to test demand of Namesake’s solution and test the functionality of the product. To test it was targeted at a specific community that Luke had close ties with in Massachusetts.

We broke down the current process in Massachusetts and explored how Namesake could build something to improve that process.

As a result of the scoping, we decided to build an app that allowed people to use the app exclusively to fill the forms that made up the process. A lot of the same information was repeated throughout so we could pre-fill the later forms by capturing this information up front.

We explored ways to capture the information in our app and then create a program that would fill those pdfs digitally so the customers didn’t need to leave the app.

AT A GLANCE

PROBLEM

Changing your name in the United States is difficult
There are lots of forms and it's a complicated process
But they all ask for similar information

SOLUTION + IMPLEMENTATION

We built a web application where a user can put in all of their information once
All of that information is then used to pre-fill other forms
The app guides you through the name change process

BENEFITS

Focused on trust in design process to position Namesake as a pillar
Built with scale in mind for future iterations
Clear communication meant we were able to seamlessly build the application remotely

Design

The Namesake team had a clear visual guideline for the type of colours and typography of the app.

The core of the app was made up of forms that filled in corresponding PDF pages so our primary aim was to create a nice form filling experience in the design.

As people were filling personal information we focused on invoking trust throughout the process. For example having a picture of the form that people were filling in so they could understand why they were being asked certain questions.

We designed the database with speed in mind, making sure regularly used information was accessible easily and at speed by the platform.

Development

Development of the application was smooth and consisted of three main development processes.

Developing the Bubble front end. This was smooth and straightforward
Creating the API to pass information from Bubble to our scripts that filled the actual PDFs
Writing node.js scripts to fill the PDFs

The build took 3 months from idea to first external users. After some further feedback we added a couple of forms for other users that would have a slightly different journey and then rolled out state wide.

The app has been used to help numerous people through a previously complicated process and there is now scope to launch country wide.