Pixelated - Secure Open Source Email Client

When ThoughtWorks decided to do something to help the free Internet movement, I was selected to help tackle the problem of secure email communication and make sure regular users would understand and benefit from encrypted email.

Pixelated

When ThoughtWorks entered the Defending the Free Internet movement and decided to attack this issue by creating a secure email client, it was a common understanding that UX would be the center of its development.

I was part of the initial team that was locked in a room for a month in order to build a proper interface to a backend already in development.

I was able to do a lot of research to identify the type of users the interface should serve best, benchmarking of competing email clients, and long sketching sessions to then start coding as soon as a solution was defined.

Usability testing helped us validate the direction we wanted to take, and soon we noticed that some paradigms we aimed to break would actually work pretty well.

Design is not only about creating new things, it’s also about reinventing old ones, and I’m pretty sure the first moments of Pixelated were already doing so