Designing an Efficient TSA Security Kiosk Interface
Background
Peak travel season pushes TSA officers to their limits, manually verifying thousands of documents while ensuring security. What if there was a way to ease this burden? Learn how I designed the interface for NEC’s self-verification mobile kiosk that streamlines the verification process, enhancing security, and freeing up TSA resources.
TSA Officer (TSO)
In addition to line management, TSOs screen passengers, baggage, and cargo at airports and other transportation hubs to prevent the introduction of prohibited items and potential threats.
The challenge, the team, the methods
As the UX Designer, I was challenged with designing the kiosk’s interface in a way that enabled passengers to self-verify. Therefore, freeing-up TSOs to focus on streamlining the passenger flow while maintaining a safe and secure environment.
The Team
Product Manager - Lead the product strategy, ensuring the kiosk and UI design aligned with business goals.
Solution Architect - Bridged the gap between the kiosk hardware, software and NEC’s biometrics services.
Software Engineer - Tested and developed the kiosk UI while providing guidance on constraints.
HCD Methods
Personas > Journey Mapping > Wire-framing > UI Design
Research
User Personas
With secondary research and my Product Manager’s input, who is an SME in the travel domain, we crafted personas that brought our users and their needs to the forefront. (See Image A).
Image A - User Personas built from secondary research and SME input.
Current State Journey
In collaboration with the product manager, we outlined the 3-minute verification process (See Image B), where TSOs manually verified up to 80 passengers per shift. The repetitive nature of this task, especially during extended shifts and holidays, added cognitive strain and heightened security vulnerabilities.
Image B - Current state CJM demonstrating the manual effort of TSOs.
Target State Journey
With a foundational understanding of today’s experience, I produced a Target State Journey Map (See Image C). Illustrating how the NEC’s new mobile kiosk removes the need for TSOs to manually verify passenger identities, closing critical security gaps that come with human error.
Image C - Target state CJM showing the elimination of TSOs manual process.
Defining the Problem
With deep user insights, we crafted a problem statement that zeroed in on the core design challenge—ensuring a solution that truly benefits the users.
How might we design a kiosk user interface that enables passengers to self-verify so that TSOs are freed-up to focus on situational safety?
Ideation
Kiosk Screens
Designed with both passengers and TSOs in mind, the kiosk presented two separate displays. The design would be based on familiar UI elements provided by the PM (See Image D). This kept interactions intuitive, avoiding slowdowns and reducing additional workload for TSOs.
Image D - PM created guidance design based on the existing solutions.
User Flows
Before designs, I created a user flow expanding on the provided design mocks (See Image E). This served as reference to ensure the interface design moved users forward in the process while covering error states.
Image E - User Flow demonstrating the passenger verification steps and failure flows.
Wire-framing
After a few conversations with engineering on the limits of the kiosk and an understanding of the expected layout and element placement, I built low fidelity wireframes (See Image F) to facilitate communication with the lead engineer and the PM. This was instrumental in discussion on functionality, interactions, and capturing any usability concerns.
Image F - Low fidelity wireframes
Making it POP!
Derived from the TSA logo, I build the color palette that gave the UI a strong but sleek character. Expanding the on logo’s tints, tones, and shades to create high-contrasting colors for calls-to-actions, status messages, and step indications (See Image G,H, and I).
Image G - UI tone definition
Image H - Passenger self-verification interface designs.
Image I - TSA Offer hand-on interface designs.
Outcome & Results
The interface design was integrated in to the NEC’s kiosk (See Image H), resulting the automation of passenger verification. Thanks to the new UI design, TSOs could now manage three kiosks at once, cutting staffing requirements by a third, maintaining existing passenger verification rate, and closing security gaps caused by manual checks. See the breakdown below. ↓
Image H - Demo of the new kiosk design with the integrated UI.
Image J - TSA Offer hand-off monitoring designs.
Current TSA Resources Needs
1 Kiosk : 1 TSO => 20 Verifications per Hour (est. 1 every 3 min)
1 TSA Checkpoint => 3 Kiosks : 3 TSOs => 60 Verifications per hour
15 TSA Checkpoints at DFW Int. Airport => 45 Kiosks : 45 TSOs => 900 Verifications per hour
New TSA Resources Needs
3 Kiosk : 1 TSO => 20 Verifications per Hour (est. 1 every 3 min)
1 TSA Checkpoint => 3 Kiosks : 1 TSOs => 60 Verifications per hour
15 TSA Checkpoints at DFW Int. Airport => 45 Kiosks : 15 TSOs => 900 Verifications per hour
Higher Passenger Satisfaction
Passengers feedback during the beta pilot:
“The kiosk scanned my face and boarding pass in seconds—no more waiting in long lines just to show my ID!”
“The instructions were so clear, even my 70-year-old mom used it without help. Big green checkmark when done was reassuring!”
What went wrong?
Engineers flagged latency in NEC’s facial recognition (~5 seconds), risking passenger queue buildup. My wireframes assumed near-instant verification. This resulted in the introduction of status screens ("Verifying...") to manage wait-time expectations.
Bright lights and large windows at the airport revealed unanticipated failures (e.g., glare on screens, passengers skipping steps). Post-launch, TSOs report kiosks increase workload due to errors. With rapid iteration we added audio cues, anti-glare coatings, and clearer error recovery flows.
In an international airport, not everyone reads english! During the beta pilot, non-english passengers had trouble understanding wordy text instructions.
We modified the passenger UI to use strong iconography with minimal text.
Bring up the “Get Help” CTA after 30 seconds of no activity.
While speed was praised, some requested more language options.
Key Lessons Learned
Deep user research (even via SMEs/secondary data) was critical for designing a UI that reduced workload while maintaining security.
Using familiar UI elements (based on the existing solution) minimized passenger learning curves and TSO retraining.
Frictionless UX enabled strategic automation freeing up human resources for higher-value tasks (e.g., threat detection) and improves accuracy.
Aesthetic choices (e.g., status indicators) are instrumental in high-stakes environments where errors have serious consequences.
Conclusion
This project reveal team work and UX design can transform bureaucratic processes into efficient, secure systems. The lessons extend beyond aviation—any high-volume, high-stakes verification context (e.g., healthcare, border control) could apply this approach.