With less than 3 years to deadlines for international roll-out of biometrically enabled E-Passports and other MRTDs, and the global IT systems that underpin them, there is still a disproportionate focus on technology, steered by the vested interests of technology vendors, IT consultants and so on.

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, real people will be using these systems, but to date research, trials and pilot schemes have not addressed human factors issues in a compelling way, other than to conclude, “more work needs to be done”. 

A recent study on behalf of the UK Passport Service is to be commended for actively engaging a representative cross-section of people, including ethnic groups and those with a range of disabilities, to see how they would handle the processes of enrolment and verification using facial, fingerprint and iris biometrics. Yet even this trial, while providing useful data, still left human factors questions unanswered, and worse, not formulated.

This is no small task. The presentation seeks to expose techniques for eliciting requirements issues that are crucial to how populations and their different groupings will interact with and react to such systems, and for assessing viewpoints, motivations, interface design, behaviour, security and performance expectations.

Such questions must be answered in practical terms if the truly inter-operable systems we desire are to be realised in practice.

To be presented at ID World 2005, Rome, 3rd November 2005