Service NSW – NSW Digital Birth Certificate
Australia’s first digital birth certificate pilot.
Executive Summary
Partnering with NSW Births, Deaths and Marriages (NSW BDMs), my team designed, built, and piloted the first digital birth certificate in Australia. During the 6 week engagement with NSW BDM we undertook discovery through stakeholder interviews and initial competitor analysis, building out a service blueprint and journey map, and validated our experience via a round of user testing within the Service NSW App.
Our user testing helped to inform a closed pilot group within the Service NSW App. From the insights gathered from our testing, the certificate was issued to the Service NSW app and had a success rate of 92% which at that time was the highest success rate for issuance in NSW.
1. Discovery & Research
Our team was approached by the Department of Birth Deaths and Marriages to digitise the birth certificate for use in the Service NSW APP.
The initiative came from past research indicating users who did not have a passport (only 20% of Australian CentreLink users have a passport) often needed another form of identity to prove who they were in 100 point checks. The Birth Certificate was identified as a good substitutive credential for users, however we also knew that specifically first nations residents often don’t have a birth certificate, and would need further initiatives to unpack their experience.
Using our internal default ULM (unified licensing model) experience as our reference, we unpacked the user’s journey and the service blueprint to understand how data matching, legislation and risks the user’s journey may encounter.
We started by undertaking internal (SNSW & BDM) NSW government stakeholder interviews and began to build our story to validate in later user testing.
2. Data Matching and Integration
From past insights we knew that certain credential types could confuse users when onboarding, specifically through name matching. Users with low risk credentials would often use short names or initials when identifying themselves. The team used this to test a new feature assisting users at the beginning of the onboarding process by teaching users the importance of name matching, specifically for a higher risk credential like a birth certificate.
We then engaged with Security and Fraud in Service NSW to collaboratively build out an experience which would inform the user of the needs for data matching.
We had a success rate of 92% for this credential which was the highest onboarding pilot success rate for any credential in the SNSW App.
3. Prototype
Our prototype for the digital birth certificate went through a large number of rounds of feedback as we had some many different areas of government across both Service NSW and BDM.
The initial prototype was built and tested within Figma with an inclusive audience. Unfortunately due to the time frame the accessibility of the initial prototype was lacking, however in the pilot phase the team redeemed itself with a fully accessible experience.
4. Trust and Fraud prevention
After an initial internal validation of the prototype, we updated the designs and functionality and built out the journey with our engineers and associates from Trust and Fraud.
Our onboarding screens went through refinement and were launched into the app to great success. Users were able to understand and correctly match their data which lead to a very high issuance rate, an obstacle SNSW had been trying to solve for some time.
