A document
you can't lose

Trust was the thing we were really optimising for. At the time, the honest read on government apps was that people felt safer when things were actually native on iOS and Android — not one cross-platform UI that looks like neither — so that’s the direction we took.

I sat with the iOS and Android devs and kept each build feeling like it belonged on that platform. Day to day I was mostly in four areas:

Biometrics and permissions. Face ID, Touch ID, Android biometrics — the full sign-in path — with prompts staged so the first open didn’t feel like twenty pop-ups in a row. If biometrics flaked, you could still fall back to a PIN and keep going.

• Flows that look like banking and the OS settings helped with the “is this dodgy?” gut check.
• If a scan failed, you weren’t dumped back to square one.

Accessibility. We hired specialists and ran sessions with people who use assistive tech day to day. I helped frame the research, sat in, then patched the designs from what we heard. WCAG AA behaviour and focus order went into the specs so screen reader paths weren’t an afterthought.

• No mystery meat controls or focus jumping all over the place.
• The a11y bar was in the documentation early, not a panic before launch.

Onboarding and copy. First run was mine end to end: account, email check, PIN, biometrics, first cert. I wrote the validation, hints, and errors for the lot (email, passwords, DOB, PIN mismatch, etc.) so a mistake read as “fix this” instead of “you broke it.”

• You could recover from a typo without rage-quitting setup.
• Copy stayed blunt: what we’re asking, why, what happens next.

Design library. I put in tokens and components — colour, type, 8px grid, SF Symbols, buttons, inputs, lists, the native bits, plus certificate tiles so more than one cert didn’t turn the home screen into a mess.

We shipped production iOS and Android apps and ran a proof of concept and pilot with NSW early childhood centres.

Technically it’s MFA, biometrics, multiple certs per account, verified PDFs out through the system share sheet. For parents the pitch is just: the real document lives on the phone, you can share it when someone asks, and we didn’t hand-wave the security bits.

• Legally the same as paper, just not stuck in a drawer.
• Orgs get something they can take seriously, not a photo of a creased scan.
• In the pilot, centre staff and parents actually bought the trust story — that was the test.

Small postscript: digital birth certs have since rolled into the Service NSW app — which is more or less the consolidation we’d argued for on the project. Funny how time works; nice when the roadmap catches up.