Native iOS & Android apps for the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages — a secure digital birth certificate that carries the same legal weight as the paper original.
A birth certificate is often the only ID a child has — and it's built entirely around paper.
Every time a parent needs to prove a child's identity — daycare enrolment, junior sports, student identifier number applications — they hit friction. Photocopies get rejected. Handling the physical document risks loss or damage, particularly in natural disasters.
The Registry wanted a secure digital equivalent with the same legal weight as the paper certificate, and an easy path to share a verified PDF.
The app had to feel unmistakably safe. That meant native components, not a cross-platform UI layer.
I partnered with iOS and Android developers to figure out how native libraries could carry the design intent without breaking platform conventions. I led four areas:
Biometrics & permissions. End-to-end authentication flow across iOS (Face ID, Touch ID) and Android's more open biometric stack, including permission-prompt sequencing at first-run and fallback to PIN when biometrics failed.
Accessibility. We engaged an external agency for a11y user testing. I co-wrote the study plan, observed sessions, and iterated designs based on findings. Produced WCAG AA documentation and focus-order specs for screen readers across every screen.
Onboarding & UX copy. Owned the first-time flow — account creation, email verification, PIN, biometrics, adding a certificate — and wrote validation, hint, and error-state copy for every input (email format, password rules, date of birth, PIN mismatch).
Design library. Contributed to colour, typography, 8px spacing grid, SF Symbols iconography, buttons, input fields, list items, native components, and the certificate tile/card components.
A production iOS and Android app, taken through proof-of-concept and pilot with NSW early-childhood education centres, then released to the broader NSW public.
The app supports multi-factor authentication, biometric login, multiple certificates per user, and verified PDF sharing to Gmail, Messages, Slack, and anywhere else via the native share sheet.
Visual design alone cannot make a sensitive app feel safe.
The security signal has to come from platform-native patterns users already recognise, from UX copy that doesn't hide what's happening, and from accessibility being built in rather than retrofitted. Writing good error copy is its own design discipline — a single line of validation text is often the difference between completing setup and abandoning the app entirely.
