User Experience has never been more vital to security and digital identity as it is today. As humans, we always strived for better security. Over thousands of years we learned to secure ourselves, our crops, stocks, properties, and so on. But when we invented computers, the internet and other connected devices, suddenly the best thing we could muster up was “What’s the secret word?” A recent study I conducted revealed some interesting results about our behavior and relationship with “Secret Words” — aka Passwords — which are fundamental in our digital identities. While most in the industry don’t practice data-breach friendly password management, think for a moment about other people, the ones who aren’t cybersecurity experts – family members, friends, employees, customers… end-users. This poor state of identity protection isn’t human error, it’s the result of decades of assumptions made by our cybersecurity industry as a whole. Usability is at the core of any successful and desired product – cybersecurity and digital identity shouldn’t be different. If we don’t make security and digital identity usable and seamless, we can’t expect desired outcomes from people using it. Technology can only be as good as the ones designing it, and we should do better. (Security, Consumer Identity, Architecture & Deployment, Standards, User Experience, Yan Grinshtein)