IRMA

IRMA is a mobile app for identity management that resembles a digital wallet on your phone. It allows you to collect verified information about yourself, such as your name and address, and to store this information on your device. IRMA then makes it possible to use this information to log in and access websites and to sign documents digitally.1 Two remarkable qualities distinguish the IRMA app: First, with IRMA, users only reveal necessary information about themselves....

When it comes to mobile applications, most people find out how an app works and what it does by using it — not by studying manuals, accompanying websites or extensive documentation. Yet, a user-friendly website for IRMA is crucial for supporting the existing user community as well as for reaching new and potential future users. For a long time, the IRMA app has been prominently featured on the Privacy by Design Foundation website....

Before testing an app with users, it is useful to get known problems out of the way first. After all, you want to learn something new rather than waste people’s time and annoy them with issues you could have fixed already. There are many methods one can use to identify problems oneself. With the NLnet team, we conducted an expert evaluation called cognitive walkthrough. With this method, we identified a list of key issues that should be addressed, and that we plan to fix in new and upcoming versions of IRMA....

Today, KPN published the newest edition of their European Cyber Security Perspectives report series. This 7th edition features an article by Bart Jacobs and Hanna Schraffenberger, which addresses how focusing on privacy impacts the user experience and describes design considerations in the ongoing (re)design of the interface of the IRMA app. The article is entitled “Friction for Privacy”, and we are happy to also feature it on this blog. Read on if you are interested in why privacy by design needs user experience design or download the entire report by KNP here....

The IRMA made easy project aims to make IRMA usable and accessible to users with all kinds of capabilities. While most of the project focuses on end-users, we also find it crucial that programmers can easily start using IRMA. To this end, the IRMA-team has a documentation page up and running that shows programmers how to, for instance, run their own IRMA server, request IRMA attributes, and ultimately make use of IRMA authentication and IRMA signatures....

One goal of the IRMA made easy project is to make IRMA easy for everyone, including users with disabilities. So, when the plan to develop a new IRMA app took shape in 2019, we set accessibility as a primary goal and got to work. By the time the new IRMA app was released in June 2020, we had implemented and tested many accessibility features. However, the journey did not end here....

If you can read this text, it means that the contrast between the text and its background is big enough for you to distinguish the foreground from the background. However, this does not necessarily mean that the contrast is also sufficient for others. When developing the IRMA app, we quickly learned that when it comes to accessibility (a11y) we cannot simply trust our own eyes. Instead, to ensure the app is legible also for people with weaker visual acuity, we followed widely accepted contrast guidelines....

The IRMA app can hold personal and sensitive information, such as a user’s name, citizen service number, and bank account number. The core functionality of IRMA is to disclose this information to requesting parties, e.g., to log in to a website. Naturally, it is crucial that only the legitimate user of an IRMA app can access the app’s contents and disclose these data. In order to guarantee this, the IRMA app uses a PIN that the user can set when opening IRMA for the first time....

The IRMA app currently exists in Dutch and English. If a user’s phone is set to Dutch, the app will also be in Dutch. If their phone is set to any other language, the IRMA app will appear in English. In order to support additional languages, IRMA relies on contributions by members of the IRMA community. We have translated the IRMA app to German and documented the process to make future translations easier for the community....

Early on in the IRMA made easy project, we conducted an expert evaluation of the IRMA app. You can find a blog post detailing our findings here. One of our main goals for our project was to eliminate the usability problems found in the old version of IRMA. While we originally had planned to improve the IRMA app step by step, things turned out even better: Around the start of our project, we learned that the municipality of Amsterdam (and specifically Mike Alders) was designing an ideal identity management app....

The IRMA made easy project is meant to make IRMA easy for everyone. So far, the project has focused primarily on end users. This tutorial is a bit different. It aims at making it easier for developers to use and integrate IRMA in their projects, by guiding them step-by-step through a typical IRMA use-case. Specifically, the tutorial gives an overview of how to control access to a static website with attribute-based authentication via IRMA....

The identity-management app IRMA is designed as a digital wallet that holds a user’s personal information in the form of virtual cards. These cards can contain all kinds of details, such as a user’s name, address, age, email address, mobile number and more. Users obtain these cards from trusted sources, such as the municipality of Nijmegen, which issues the information from the Dutch Personal Records Database to everyone living in the Netherlands....

The IRMA app is a digital wallet that holds personal information, such as a user’s name, mobile number and citizen service number. IRMA allows users to disclose this information to requesting parties, e.g., to log in to a website. A core principle of IRMA is that users are in control about whether they disclose their data. To decide this, users need to know who is asking for their information, what information is requested from them, why it is required and how it will be used....

All good things come to an end. This is also true for the IRMA made easy project. However, this does not mean that all IRMA UX developments need to stop. In contrast: the IRMA team is committed to improving the IRMA user experience, and the IRMA community on slack is going strong with suggestions for improvements. In this blog post, we reflect on the IRMA made easy project and suggest a direction for future developments....