In Hungary, navigating government services meant deciphering bureaucratic language across dozens of unconnected portals; most people queued at a government window instead.
The Digital Citizenship Programme (DÁP) reorganised this from the citizen's perspective: one mobile-first ecosystem with digital identity, binding e-signatures, and services organised around life events.
Within 18 months, 1.66M citizens registered voluntarily, completing now in minutes what previously demanded a visit in office.
Innovation Summary
Innovation Overview
When the team researched what citizens actually experienced on Hungarian government websites, it found the same pattern across every domain: people could not find the service they needed, did not understand the language when they found it, and could not complete the process even when they understood it. The root cause was structural: siloed IT governance with no shared standards, no design or user research capability anywhere in government, and no mechanism for agencies to learn from each other. Hungary had strong IT infrastructure and skilled technologists, but 80% of state IT capacity went to maintaining legacy systems, and what innovation did happen was designed from thousand-page specifications without observing a real user. As our CEO put it: brilliant technological solutions were sometimes built for problems nobody actually had.
In December 2022, the government adopted the Digital Citizenship Programme (DÁP) to reorganise public services around life events and standardise user experience across government, also setting up the Digital Hungary Agency to coordinate delivery. After the initial phase, the DÁP app launched in September 2024, the plain-language life-event web portal in mid-2025. Selling a car used to require paper contracts and multiple office visits. Now buyer and seller connect via QR code in the app, digitally sign a binding contract, and the system handles the ownership transfer. We built development around a permanent research pipeline: 4,000+ citizen interviews shaped the initial design, and continuous usability testing drives every biweekly release. 92% of the app's features trace directly to citizen feedback.
What makes this possible is a platform of reusable capabilities underneath. Citizens hold certified data in a digital wallet and share attributes selectively with organisations. Qualified e-signatures are embedded directly into third-party workflows, so a bank or utility can trigger document signing from their own service. Consent-based data provision lets organisations pull verified data from state registries, with citizens approving each request and able to revoke consent. A mandatory Design System, published openly at services.gov.hu, standardises the look, language, and behaviour of all public digital services.
Citizen benefit is proven by traction: 3.13 million have voluntarily downloaded the app in 18 months (32% of population), with over 200,000 using it daily.
The programme is anchored in legislation (Act CIII of 2023) and funded through EUR 45 million in EU structural funds. Five life-event services are in development, and Hungary is preparing its European Digital Identity Wallet for cross-border use. From the start, we designed for modularity and transferability, so the approach can scale beyond its current scope. The next frontier is proactive administration, where the state acts on what it already knows about a citizen's life situation automatically.
Innovation Description
What Makes Your Project Innovative?
DÁP is not just a better digital service; it is a systemic innovation model that changed governance, standards, and coordination across Hungarian public administration.
First, the innovation stopped building from assumptions. Previous projects started with thousand-page specifications written without observing users. DÁP started with 4,000-5,000 citizen interviews and built research into permanent practice.
Second, the team made design a governance tool. The DÁP Design System is legally mandatory for all government digital services, published openly at services.gov.hu.
Third, the team changed how government builds software. 200+ specialists work in scaled agile with 30 designers and biweekly releases, priorities driven by usage data rather than assumptions.
Fourth, mandatory quality oversight was created. Under new legislation, every public body planning a digital service must notify the Agency before starting, giving us visibility to steer quality across all government digital development.
What is the current status of your innovation?
New features ship every two weeks. 29 private companies (banks, utilities, telecoms) are live, 300+ testing. The Design System is spreading: the tax authority's app, national e-health platform, and family portal have adopted it. Every public body planning a digital service now reports to the Agency under the mandatory notification system.
Priorities: build five full life-event services, Hungary's EU Digital Identity Wallet by December 2026, and AI-powered summaries of official communications.
Innovation Development
Collaborations & Partnerships
Citizens were the primary partners through co-creation built into permanent practice: 4,000-5,000 interviews, continuous usability testing, and service safaris shaped 92% of app features.
Lawmakers adapted legislation to serve users, not the other way around, requiring every public body to notify the Agency before starting any digital development.
Private sector partners co-develop integration standards through joint forums and shared sandbox environments.
Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries
Citizens verify their identity, sign legally binding documents, and request certificates from their phone, controlling every data-sharing consent. Plain language and user-centred design lower the barrier for people with weaker digital skills. 200,000 use DÁP daily.
Government agencies reuse DÁP's Design System, identity, and e-signature capabilities, cutting duplication while ensuring consistency.
Private companies authenticate customers through DÁP. 29 are live, 300+ testing.
Innovation Reflections
Results, Outcomes & Impacts
The intended impact is faster, more transparent government services co-built with citizens. Use is entirely voluntary.
Observed results against a target of 300K new users per year:
-1.66M registered in 18 months (5x target),
-200K daily active users,
-44M logins,
-1.95M e-signature certificates since Jan. 2025 (vs 15K/year under the old system),
-807K documents,
-154K appointments,
-8% of police checks are done via the app.
Tracked through real-time dashboards and continuous user research. Feature priorities driven by observed usage patterns.
Independent validation: Hungary improved 28 places on the World Bank GovTech Maturity Index and achieved 62% improvement in user-centricity on the OECD Digital Government Index, attributed to DÁP.
Challenges and Failures
The most measurable challenge is onboarding. EU regulations require high-assurance identity verification. Of 3.13M downloads, 1.66M completed registration. The selfie-based remote verification was based but have not fully resolved this.
Public trust was harder than expected. Citizens fear data misuse, and communicating why the system is secure proved harder than building the security itself.
Internally, team consisted of 3,000 staff with 30 designers and no user representation in leadership. 60+ designers were hired and a Design Directors were appointed to management boards, ensuring someone at the table represents citizens.
An experimentation mindset was applied: sandbox environments, A/B testing, iterative pilots, and continuous iteration on real usage data.
Conditions for Success
Strong foundations: Hungary had robust registries and IT infrastructure. We built on what predecessors created.
Enabling legislation: laws were written to support the mission. Act CIII of 2023 created the mandatory notification system to ensure service quality across all government.
Political leadership that set direction, then let the team work with citizens so their needs drove development.
The right people in interdisciplinary teams: researchers, designers, lawyers and developers working together. Hired from the private sector at competitive salaries, grew from 30 to 90+ designers. Turnover dropped to 3%.
A shared mission: bringing Hungary's digitalization to the forefront of Europe attracted talent and sustained momentum.
Lessons Learned
Start with citizens, not systems. Assumptions lead to well-built services nobody uses.
Design standards are a governance tool, not a guideline. Making them mandatory ensures consistency and quality.
Build capabilities, not just services. Reusable identity, signature and data-sharing components allow every new integration to increase system value.
Legislation should enable better services, not constrain them.
Appoint clear user representation in decision-making. Without it, technical and institutional logic will dominate by default.
Continuous research must be built into delivery, not added later. Create an institutional learning environment where findings are documented, shared across teams and fed back into every release.
Anything Else?
Digital government often fails not because of technology, but because it solves the wrong problems.
Large-scale user research revealed consistent systemic issues: citizens cannot find services, do not understand them, and struggle to use them.
This reinforced a core principle: the goal is not to digitise administration, but to reduce the need for citizens to interact with it.
Effective services require coordination across government and private actors.
Building shared communities across institutions proved essential, creating the foundation for user-centred services at scale.
The Design System and standards are published openly at services.gov.hu, and international interest confirms the approach is transferable.
Status:
- Implementation - making the innovation happen
Innovation provided by:
Files:
Date Published:
29 September 2026