This blog post is for anyone interested in the technical development of GOV.UK Verify.
In our first technical delivery update we explained that there are 3 parts to GOV.UK Verify and the delivery team is responsible for building and maintaining 2 of them: the GOV.UK Verify hub and Document Checking Service.
Currently, we’re working on 3 technical delivery priorities: increasing departmental adoption of GOV.UK Verify; improving the completion rate for GOV.UK Verify users; and improving and maintaining GOV.UK Verify. In the past month, we focused on two of these priorities: improving the completion rate and maintaining GOV.UK Verify.
As GOV.UK Verify is live, our work to maintain and improve the service continues at pace. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been working on since our last update back in September and what we plan to do next.
Improving the completion rate
To improve the volume of visits that result in a user creating or re-using a verified account with a certified company, we’ve:
- started investigating the technical possibility of helping users to pause their identity verification journey for them to come back and finish it later
- analysed our usage logs to find out more about the type of errors users encounter
- started working on improving how we handle these errors and provide further support to users.
Improving and maintaining GOV.UK Verify
We want to continue to improve the way we run the GOV.UK Verify federation and operate the live service effectively. To continue keeping GOV.UK Verify available and secure we’ve:
- started automating lengthy steps in our process when releasing code to our live environment
- upgraded lots of applications and libraries to their newer versions so we continue to run the most up-to-date and secure code
Things we plan to do next
In the coming 2 to 3 weeks we expect to:
- help users indicate the type of driving licence they have so we can make better recommendations to them about which certified companies they can use to verify
- run an A/B test to find out if asking whether users have a bank account, debit and/or credit would improve our ability to determine which certified companies can verify them
- help users continue verifying their identity after they have asked a question or provided feedback to the GOV.UK Verify team
- continue recruiting new members for the technical delivery team - we’re looking for web ops engineers, developers and more! If you’re interested in joining us at GDS, check out our current vacancies.
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2 comments
Comment by MarkK posted on
The government selection of the most suitable company is a remarkable intervention in what is is purported to be a market. Why is improving the user experience not being led by the companies in the framework?
Reading the terms and conditions and deciding not to continue should not be classed as an error, but then if people are finishing in 10 minutes most presumably do not do so. What proportion do read the T&Cs and privacy statements, and how many of them continue?
In GB, at least, it's a "driving licence", using the English spelling and with the focus on controlling the activity, not the person - a subtle but important distinction.
Comment by Emily Ch'ng posted on
Hi Mark
Thanks for your comments.
The questions we've been testing are for the same purpose as the other questions in the hub. The purpose, as always, is to determine which certified companies will be able to verify users, based on the evidence the user has. The new questions are just reflecting the additional means of verification that certified companies have that are not reflected in the current hub. We've updated the post to clarify this.