The project seeks to meet student needs articulated by the Students’ Association and will ensure engagement with the Students’ Association by extending an invitation of membership of theproject team. The University smartcard would be preserved as the primary means of identity on campus, but also having a digital identity on smartphone would open up potential efficiencies. Distance learners for example may not require a physical card as they are not on campus.

The project will have 2 phases: firstly research led by UX Service staff into student ideas about id on phone, and bring together service staff and technologists together with incentivised students to co-design potential solutions; and secondly design and delivery of a proof of concept working system.

Building on USI012 ‘Selfies, Snapchat & Student ID’, we will explore what students mean by ID services on phones, and why they feel they’ll be beneficial, so as expose opportunities and constraints within the potential technologies and ensure the service is useful. Engagement with third party providers will test their acceptance of digital identity.

We will then explore potential solutions. One line of enquiry could be to enhance the existing Card Image API to return additional text data items and build a small application to consume the updated Card API and develop server - side processing to calculate the secure value that would be used to request the photo image, plus a web UI to display data to the user, and ensuring that the data from the API is only exposed to the correct user.