Designing the Future of Digital Identity

Project Management, Strategy, UI/UX Design, Wireframing, Lo-fi & Hi-fi Prototyping
IDEO
Designer
Aug 2015 - Dec 2015
What would the world look like if we digitized our passports, IDs, and diplomas?
If you look at how we interact with the world, it’s pretty messy. We use so many different things to identify ourselves: a driver’s license, passport, credit card, even a random Social Security Number. On top of that we have usernames, passwords, FaceID, and so much more.

Confusing, huh? At IDEO, I worked on a project that created the future of Digital Identity. Having gained some expertise over blockchain technology, I worked with a team of designers, business people, and engineers to dive deeper into the interoperability of blockchains.

We worked with real partners including Citibank and Nasdaq to propose a new federated identity system for financial systems.

In the World...
What is the Future of Digital Identity via Medium
A Framework for Identity via Coindesk
Nasdaq and Citi Announce Pioneering Blockchain and Global Banking Integration via Nasdaq

Understanding the messiness of how we identify ourselves

What is your “identity”? Do you define yourself by your name? Your birthday? Your ethnicity? Your work?

It’s a big, existential question but a necessary one in order to create new systems for the digital age. We spent 4 weeks conducting in-depth user and expert research to better understand the tangible forms of our identity.

Codifying our various forms of identity.

Our identities exist in both physical and digital entities. The physical entities include driver’s licenses, passports, greencards, birth certificates and more. As you can see, those are forms of identification that are registered and authenticated by a larger, centralized organization - usually the government.

Then we have our identities in the digital world. Those include usernames, passwords, email addresses, verification codes, and even more. A general pattern that exists amongst these forms of identification is that consumers tend to take care of the registration process: we assign avatars and usernames ourselves, without much mediation from a larger, centralized institution.

So how are we actually doing?

Long story short, we suck. As I led some user interviews with people, it was clear that there were some bad identity habits, but before going in depth, let’s start with an example.

Imagine you’re traveling to Japan on vacation. You have your bags packed, your boarding pass loaded onto your phone, and your passport in hand. But in this world, the TSA agent scans your passport and then prints out a photo-copy of it. He takes that photo-copy and just puts it in a pile of other photocopies on the ground beside him. Now you ask, “is that secure?”

The reality is that most people are just as careless with their digital identities as the example above. People use the same passwords for every single account. Banks use our social security numbers as both an identifier but also a passcode. Other companies only require a Facebook page, which could totally be fake.

We tend to hide behind the facade of cool UI’s or “password lock” icons without really thinking about how we manage our digital identities.

What does a new framework for identity look like?

After highlighting this problem area, we knew that there was a huge opportunity behind how digital identities are created and used.

I worked with our designers to create strategic concepts and prototypes that were both validated by business designers and technical engineers. We wanted to propose a framework that would guide development of a safe, functional blockchain-based identity system.

A new identity system must do six main thing: issue, store, authenticate, authorize, recover, update, and audit. If it misses even one of these components, we revert to our existing, messy landscape of digital identity.

Prototyping New Blockchain-Based Methods of Identity

This is where things got fun. Almost immediately, we started writing code with based on new forms of blockchain to see what our technical limitations were. After gaining some familiarity, we started created application-based prototypes to see which use cases would best serve a new identity system.

I took ownership over a prototype focused on professional certifications and diplomas. The concept was to make validate and legitimize LinkedIn Skills, endorsements, and diplomas.

We quickly found out that there are people who fake their work experience or educational background just to connect with other. We had a great opportunity being so closely affiliated with Harvard. We had access to on-campus mentors and MOOC partners that could let us test real prototypes extremely quickly.

Along with the design research and strategy, I designed and built a web app that would post metadata to a blockchain transaction to validate a diploma. Early wireframes were built in Sketch and the App was built on a FERN stack.

Partnering with Real Institutions to Bring Concepts to Life

We partnered with Citibank and Nasdaq to validate our assumptions and plan out the next steps to bringing our ideas to life.

Design is also about viability

Most people misinterpret design as a way to make things look pretty. But I believe that design is about making things work.

Business viability is a core aspect to making a design work. If the business models, cost structures, and revenue streams don’t make sense, then the design is also rendered useless.

I worked with some business designers to create a business plan to determine how a new identity system would make money and get funded.

A Collaborative Consortium

At the end of our expedition, it was clear that we had created a collaborative consortium of member that were interested in our findings and prototypes.

the IDEO coLab ended up bring in 4 partners including Citibank, Nasdaq, Fidelity, and Liberty Mutual. And since then, the coLab has expanded into other interest areas such as the Food Supply Chain, the Sharing Economy, Mobility, and more.