Dignari Wins DHS Digital Wallet Challenge

Dignari was announced as the grand prize winner in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) Trusted User Interface for Digital Wallets Challenge.

In September 2020, DHS S&T launched the Challenge to call “…on innovators to design an easy-to-use and trustworthy UI that improves the overall user experience (UX) and management of digital wallet-based credentials.” The Challenge was divided into two distinct stages of competition.

Stage 1 solicited concepts and ideas from the public and requested a video submission addressing a particular use case. The video was to provide an overview of your design approach as well as a demonstration of how a person would use your digital wallet app to apply for a job. Three finalists were selected from Stage 1 to move on to Stage 2. In Stage 2, the finalists built on their Stage 1 concepts, engaged further with the community, and delivered a final design system for judging.

Dignari responded to the challenge by combining solution architects from our Emerging Technology team and designers from our Human-Centered Design team. We dove into the digital wallet community and actively engaged with those leaning forward into the development of industry standards, best practices, and commercial applications.

The importance of digital identity and human-centered design

Digital identity, and ancillary concepts such as digital wallets, continue to gain momentum in industry and as a result are experiencing significant advancements toward wider adoption. It’s a dynamic technology domain that is rich in community discourse and ripe for system development. Given its nascent state, implementing human-centered design early in the process may significantly help the technology reach its potential earlier than anticipated.

By developing UI/UX mockups, and an overarching design system, technical standards can suddenly be visualized. Having something you can see and engage with can spur a groundswell of anticipation and amplify idea generation. This is one of the primary goals that DHS set out to accomplish when launching the challenge and it was something that the technical community realized and embraced as well.

Quality design and well-defined use case demonstrations allow stakeholders to see the value of the technology, the utility of the apps, and the potential for more secure and trustworthy transactions between individuals and organizations.

Adoption requires community

Our winning design system is modeled after other successful design systems in governments around the world, providing an open-source platform for the exchange and advancement of digital design artifacts. At Dignari we believe in the value of collaborative and community-driven development and have made our design system publicly available on GitHub. While the design system is far from complete, it does provide bootstrap design capabilities for anyone interested in digital wallet solutions and forms a foundation for future growth.

As the technical community drives toward published international standards and interoperability goals, the human-centered design community should keep pace—working together to demonstrate how digital identity and digital wallets may profoundly change how we interact with both public and private sector entities.

Dignari is extremely grateful for this recognition and we remain dedicated and excited to continue the journey toward more widespread, secure, and trustworthy digital identity user experiences.

View our submission and work with us

If you are interested in seeing our final submission and learning more about the competition, please visit our DHS Challenge landing page. We built this website to serve as the central location for all of our work products, to include links to our participation in the W3C Credentials Community Group (CCG), our Phase 1 and Phase 2 video submissions, links to our GitHub repos, background information on our design principles, and a list of changes we made along the way.

If you are interested in our Human-Centered Design or Emerging Technology services, please contact us today.