One scenario the Digital Identity Team wanted to tackle was how the platform would handle federated identity in a realistic situation, where the touch points would be digital and physical, and would require different identity management systems communicating with each other. As noted, it had to be a realistic scenario.
Naturally renting a car comes to mind, right?
Let’s back track.
Bob Schukai, the visionary behind our team, highlighted a situation he encountered during one his business trips. When it comes to flying, almost every part of the process has been radically improved — mobile check-ins, digital boarding passes, kiosks in place of counters, mobile passports; even premier options for purchase — TSA Pre-Check, Global Entry, Clear.
But he noticed other aspects of traveling have not caught up — specifically the process of renting a car, something much simpler and straightforward than flying, and fairly commonplace when a person travels, especially for business. Some rental car services have made improvements, but they are mostly available for their upper tier customers. For instance, as a Hertz Gold Plus member, you’re able to bypass the line at the counter, while the keys and service agreements are waiting for you in the car. But you still have to wait in line to go through the inspection and ID verification process, wait for a Hertz employee to get to you and review the car, then said employee manually checks your service agreement paper and along with your booking information — all to to exit with your rental rental. So, it’s not truly an expedited “premier” experience. This is exactly what happened to Bob. If he’s been vetted and verified through Hertz’s system, and is paying extra for the premier service, then why is he not able to leave the lot with the car as soon as he gets in? At that point, all that needs to be done is to verify this specific car is leaving with this specific person, which can all be automated and with more security than a human manually checking everything.
The Concept
Working with Bob’s real life experience, we developed the “Rental Car Scenario” where we created the fake Rent-A-Car company as our fictitious rental car merchant, and Bob (naturally) as our user persona representing the customer. And Bob has recently enrolled in Bank of Costa’s Digital ID service.
For this concept, we focused solely on Bob’s touch points with Bank of Costa and Rent-A-Car. I won’t be covering the technical detail and design of how Bank of Costa, Rent-A-Car, and Thomson Reuters Digital Identity platform back end architectures would interact with one another.
We did not want to disrupt or change some of the more straightforward parts of the experience, like the actual booking. So we just recreated a simple user flow for booking a rental via the merchant’s website.
In our rental car scenario, the customer is able to check into their booking prior to physically picking up the rental, much like checking into a flight. The only difference is, there is a higher level of authentication. Bob will get a notification from the Bank of Costa mobile app, that Rent-A-Car is requesting access to his identity attributes to expedite the rental pick up process. Once Bob accepts the request, the app will generate a QR code that can then be added to the Apple Wallet. One thing to keep in mind, the code does NOT contain Bob’s information. It acts as more of a confirmation code that Bob has accepted the request and his information is valid.
When Bob is ready to pick up his rental, he is able to bypass the line and go straight to the car. As a premier member, his keys are in the car and the service agreement has been emailed to him.
To leave the lot, now all Bob has to do is go straight to the exit kiosk, that is powered by an iPad* populated with Rent-A-Car’s admin kiosk app, and initiate to scan his code. Ideally once Bob pulls up with the car, the app should initiate the scanning, but we weren’t able to get to that point to test an interaction like that.
*We envisioned the kiosk would use an iPad as that is the most accessible way to create a kiosk without custom hardware and proprietary software. And it has a built in front-facing camera.
Once the code is scanned, the kiosk app initiates the verification process. Once Bob’s information is verified, the Bank of Costa app on his mobile device will request a selfie to validate him, and since he’s on an iPhone it will request for his Face ID.
Once Face ID is verified, he’s good to go and can leave with his rental.
Credits:
Team lead: Bob Schukai
Creative direction and UX architecture: Jennifer Lee
Product management: Jennifer Singh and Bryan Colcord
Software development: Kevin Zimmerman, Ralph Duverna, Sangeetha Glova
Software architecture: Marco Pierleoni and Mario Morgado
Project management: Claudia Schaper