Messaging compliance is the gate every business has to pass before it can text its customers. At Sinch, getting through that gate meant relying on internal experts — slow, opaque, and impossible to scale.
Compliance Center is a self-serve experience inside the Sinch dashboard that lets customers understand what they need to do, complete verification steps, and improve their odds of approval — without waiting on a human. ACER is the AI-assisted review layer inside it: it flags issues before submission, predicts likelihood of approval, and turns vague rejection risk into specific, fixable recommendations.
My job was to make a genuinely hard, regulated domain feel learnable for people who are not compliance experts — and to design AI guidance they'd actually trust.
A white-glove process that couldn't scale.
Every customer who wanted to send messages had to clear carrier and regulatory requirements. In practice, that meant a Sinch specialist walked them through it by hand — interpreting rules, reviewing submissions, and absorbing the back-and-forth with carriers. It worked, but it was expensive, inconsistent, and a bottleneck on growth.
Customers were frustrated too. They didn't know what was required, why they were rejected, or what to do next. Compliance felt like a black box they were failing for reasons no one would explain.
Three audiences, one impossible middle.
To text a customer in the US, a business has to satisfy rules set by carriers and industry bodies — proving who they are and that people opted in. The hard part of the design wasn't any single screen. It was that the experience had to serve three groups whose needs pull in different directions.
How do you make people feel confident about a decision they're not qualified to make — without pretending it's simpler than it is?
That framing set my goals. I wasn't optimizing a funnel — I was building the user's confidence and the system's trustworthiness at the same time. Four goals guided every decision:
First, I made the hidden process legible.
I interviewed compliance specialists to extract what they actually do, sat in on real submissions, and read carrier documentation until the patterns surfaced. Then I mapped the end-to-end system so the whole team — product, engineering, and compliance — could finally see the same picture and agree on where a self-serve product could safely take over.
That map became the backbone of the work: every node was either something we could guide a user through, automate, or escalate to a human.
A setup guide that always answers "what now?"
I broke an intimidating process into a guided sequence with persistent progress. Users always know what's done, what's next, and why each step matters. Requirements are written in plain language, with the compliance reasoning available — but never in the way.
AI that recommends, never overrules.
ACER reviews a submission the way a specialist would — but instantly, and in the open. It surfaces a single readiness signal, then breaks it into specific recommendations the user can act on. I used AI throughout the design process too: prototyping recommendation copy, stress-testing edge cases, and exploring how much explanation users actually needed before they'd trust a suggestion.
The product lives in its states.
An AI review experience is only as good as how it handles disagreement, uncertainty, and "what if I'm wrong?" I designed for the full range — including the moments users push back.
Validating confidence, not just clicks.
The risk with AI guidance is that people either over-trust it or dismiss it. I built a research plan to test whether users understood the recommendations, felt in control, and made better-informed decisions — measuring comprehension and confidence, not only task completion.
What it moved.
Figures reflect projected and early-measured impact of the self-serve + ACER experience against the prior manual baseline.
What I'd validate next.
Compliance Center proved that expert-only work can become a product — if the interface carries the knowledge and the AI stays honest about uncertainty. If I kept going, I'd watch three things closely.