WASHINGTON – The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) today announced the grand-prize winner of the Digital Wallets Challenge. The prize challenge sought a design concept for an easy-to-use, trusted user interface (UI) for digital wallets that improves the overall user experience (UX) for the management of digital wallet-based credentials. The goal was to find a UI design that supports best practices for visual consistency, ensures security and privacy, is interoperable, and can be integrated with existing back-end processes.
“Through this challenge we worked with graphic designers to create a UI that is useful to DHS-specific applications and is readily accessed and usable by anyone in the verifiable credential community,” said Anil John, Silicon Valley Innovation Program Technical Director. “While all the finalists deserve recognition for their efforts, one winner stood out in their innovative approach, combining both an effective end-user experience and shareable back-end functionality for the verifiable credential community. We will post the winning UI for the global community to use and rework the UX of digital wallets.”
The grand-prize winner is Dignari, a woman-owned small business from Alexandria, Virginia. Dignari will receive an additional $10,000 for its winning design. DHS and its partners are digitizing the issuance and storage of credentials and many of DHS’s operations are using blockchain and distributed technologies to issue and verify credentials using open standards. These credentials are held in a digital wallet.
All of the judges were impressed with the designs. “Being part of this prize competition has been informative. The Bureau of Consular Affairs is also looking at ways to modernize our processes and seeing the user-friendly design options presented throughout this competition may influence our future initiatives, as well” said Michelle Wilson, Department of State.
“We were impressed by the submissions of the three finalists. We saw merit in multiple design selections and could see elements of each moving forward to produce practical solutions. These designs were creative, intuitive, and useful. This is the kind of innovation that serves the needs of the public that we serve, as well,” said Addison Blackburn of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Dignari was one of three finalists who presented their UI designs to federal government partners and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international standards body. As part of the challenge, finalists were encouraged to work with the standards community and blockchain technology developers, then incorporate their feedback into the final designs.
About Prize Competitions
DHS uses prize competitions to tap into innovators both within and outside of government to solve the challenges faced by the Homeland Security Enterprise. To learn more, visit the Prize Competition website or contact Prizeauthority@hq.dhs.gov.
