No Matter of Decentralization: What is Important to Users in Decentralized and Self-Sovereign Identities?

Decentralized Identity (DI) and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) are alternatives to traditional identity management by providing data control to users, but their adoption in the real world remains limited. Investigating what is important to users may provide meaningful insights into why adoption is slow and guide future development and deployment. Previous explorations of priorities were limited because they prioritized system qualities from the domain expert perspective, neglecting the viewpoint of end-users. This exploratory study addresses this gap by surveying potential DI/SSI system users, such as data owners ( \(N=79\) ), verifiers ( \(N=25\) ), and issuers ( \(N=35\) ), about their priorities when dealing with an identity system from a functional and problem perspective, as well as their relative priorities. The results show that data owners are more concerned about control qualities, such as consent, while verifiers are more focused on data integrity, and issuers prioritize verifiability of identity data. Importantly, when presented with a choice between competing qualities, the more reliable of the two measures used in this study, users across all roles consistently prioritized security and protection over other qualities, such as usability and decentralization. Usability and user experience (UX) were found to be of low importance to all actors when compared against other qualities, and particularly to data owners, further highlighting the need to re-evaluate trade-offs in DI/SSI systems, such as between data sovereignty and usability. Similarly, despite decentralization being the underlying feature of DI/SSI, it was found to be ranked low priority compared to other qualities for all types of users. However, a small cluster of data owners identified decentralization as a top priority, suggesting that it may be a niche quality rather than an underlying necessity. Together, the findings offer the first empirical insights into non-expert perspectives on DI/SSI technologies, mapping potential users’ priorities across actor roles to established SSI principles.