From today we have started to publish performance data about GOV.UK Verify on the GOV.UK performance platform as required by Point 17 of the Digital by Default Service Standard which says:
Report performance data on the Performance Platform
The data is retrospective from the start of our public beta in October 2014, and will be updated weekly from now on.
The dashboard reports volumes of users, with a rolling view of completion and success rates including additional detail broken down by type of authentication - for example, whether the user was undertaking an initial verification or was signing in having already verified with a certified company.
GOV.UK Verify is typically used as part of another service, so the way we measure performance reflects that. Here’s some explanation of each measurement we are publishing.
Number of certified companies and services
This element of the dashboard reflects the certified companies and government services currently available to all users.
At the moment we're only showing the two certified companies that have publicly available services connected. There are further companies connected to the service who are working towards going public, and they will be added to the dashboard as they go public in the coming weeks.
Likewise, in the next part of the dashboard we're showing the publicly available government services using GOV.UK Verify. There are several other services connected to GOV.UK Verify in private beta at the moment, and any live usage of GOV.UK Verify for these is reflected in the rest of the data data below. However, the services will not be added to the dashboard until their public beta release dates.
You can read more in this post about the services that we expect to join in the next few months.
Number of authentications
This section of the dashboard shows the number of people using GOV.UK Verify each week and the cumulative total.
The public beta started in October 2014. However, the majority of authentications occurred in January 2015 as a result of our self-assessment trial with HMRC. The number of authentications peaked on the 31st January, which was the last day for users to submit their tax returns.
Completion rate
The completion rate shows the proportion of visits to GOV.UK Verify which ended in a successful outcome (either someone using GOV.UK Verify for the first time and completing the initial verification process, or someone signing in to a service using GOV.UK Verify). This measure takes into account all visits to certified companies, including those where the person doesn’t attempt to verify or sign in - for example, it includes those who only visit the first page of a certified company and then leave.
Success rate
We’re also publishing the success rate for GOV.UK Verify. This shows the proportion of visits attempting to authenticate through the service that were successful. We calculate the success rate by measuring the total number of successful outcomes as a proportion of the total number of attempts to authenticate (success/success+failure).
The dashboard shows the overall success rate for the service, and breaks it down showing the rate for both initial verification and for signing in.
The metric of most interest to service managers planning to use GOV.UK Verify is the verification success rate. This effectively shows the proportion of users who are able to verify their identity online to the level of assurance required by the service.
The ability of a user to verify their identity online will, at present, vary depending on the official documents a user has to hand or the level of financial history available. We’ve previously talked about how we’re working to increase the range of data sources available for GOV.UK Verify which will improve this success rate.
The success rate for verifications at the start of the public beta was 42%. It increased to 51% in December and 60% in January when usage was highest. We expect it to continue to increase as we progress through the beta continuously improving and refining the service.
In these early stages of our beta, the success rate and completion rates can vary from week to week when the numbers of users are relatively low so a small number of successes or failures add up to several percentage points. In the most recent week, for example, the success rate has fallen to the mid-50s. Over time, as the volume of users steadily grows as more services adopt GOV.UK Verify, we expect the success rate to become more steady from one week to the next, with continous overall improvement over time.
What's next
We'll continue to update the data on a weekly basis for the previous week, every Monday, and as new services and certified companies are added you will see them on the performance dashboard.
Keep in touch by following @GOVUKverify on Twitter, signing up for email updates, or sharing your feedback in the comments below.
4 comments
Comment by Harry Metcalfe posted on
I'd be really interested to see a graph showing how many transactions go through each IDP over time - possible?
Comment by Rebecca Hales posted on
Hi Harry, thanks for your interest.
We don't have that graph at the moment.
We're still in beta - we made a start by publishing our page on the platform on Friday and will be adding more elements as we progress.
Comment by alan chaplin posted on
Is there a more up to date version of this page? In particular, the statistics on usage, completions and demographic coverage would be helpful - the links on the blog above no longer work.
thanks
Comment by Rebecca Hales posted on
Hi Alan
Thanks for your interest.
We recently updated how we report on the Performance Platform. See this blog post for more information and up-to-date links: https://identityassurance.blog.gov.uk/2016/07/08/improving-our-reporting/
For quick reference here's that account usage link (https://www.gov.uk/performance/govuk-verify/account-use) and completion rate (https://www.gov.uk/performance/govuk-verify/completion-rate).