We live in a world where almost everything we do leaves a digital footprint—data about us and our activities. For example, retailers know what we buy and how often. Thermostats know how warm we like it. Social media and online companies know places and websites we’ve visited and what we’ve searched for. Right now, every organization you’ve interacted with has a slice of your personal data. Yet, it’s hard for you to retrieve this information, let alone understand or get value from it.

Bali is disrupting the way personal data is used in society: Bali is a vault for your personal data, enabling you to aggregate your data from multiple organizations and use it for your own benefit. Similar to a financial bank, Bali lets users track their accounts and collect their data to view, search, and share securely and privately. Bali is paving the path for a personal data ecosystem in which users are in control and can benefit from their data.

We conducted user interviews to dive deeper into the need of a wide range of people, including target users who want to use their data to customize spending habits or selling or donating data. By learning about their motivations, frustrations, and needs, we were able to gain user insights. Based on these insights, we're able to create journey maps for new features.

The Bali team built a secure service in Azure that enables users to collect their data from about 90 retailers, including Amazon and major grocery chains, and from more than a 1,000 financial institutions. Users can also gather their data from Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. Bali helps users make sense of it all with easy-access analytics, a timeline view of their digital footprint, and search capabilities.

Each feature went through a wireframe phase, research, and multiple design reviews prior to being handed off to the engineering team. Below are several features that I design from end to end.

Users can connect to about 90 retailers, including Amazon and major grocery chains. Bali is able to show items purchased, when they were purchased, photos of the items purchased, as well as glean insights from purchase history.

Early versions of Bali had a footer with basic links like an FAQ and About page. Due to the addition of the activity feed, we needed to remove the footer. Our solution was to move these links into the header and expand what the user can do. Now users can turn features on and off, provide feedback, and store passwords.

The Bali team was working toward a new, improved system for pulling data from retail accounts, but we needed to see how these retailers have the data set up in their systems. Users—who choose to participate—go to one or more of the requested retailers and save their order history and an order detail page as html. Then upload those files.

This feature does a few things. First, it provides Bali with a way to remove some dependencies on other systems. Users benefit from this because the improved system provides more information. It also opens the door to future experiences like customizing spending habits and selling or donating data.