GOV.UK Verify was a way for people to prove their identity when accessing government services online. It was built by the Government Digital Service (GDS). It closed in April 2023.
]]>For a service to meet its user needs, user support is essential. Certified companies’ user support teams tend to be the primary point of contact for people when they need help using GOV.UK Verify. They also act as a channel to provide continuous and valuable feedback to the rest of their certified company, which in turn helps to improve their service.
At GOV.UK Verify, we’re committed to ensuring that our users receive comprehensive support when verifying their identity. This blog post is about how we’ve carried out observational research and interviews with our certified companies to better understand how they conduct user support to continually meet user needs.
We visited certified company support centres, and interviewed their staff to get a greater understanding of how they provide user support. We looked at everything from the training they provide to support workers, to common issues that arise from users and how they feed back what they find to the rest of their organisation. We also shadowed support workers who were supporting users trying to verify, both on the phone and on webchat.
One method that certified companies use to confirm someone’s identity is to ask knowledge based verification (KBV) questions. A KBV question is designed so that only the genuine person would know the answer to it. However, for those users unfamiliar with KBVs, this method can sometimes be challenging or confusing. At this point in their Verify journey, users may want to know more about why they are being asked these questions. User support plays a vital role in meeting these user needs.
Support workers are highly skilled and well trained. During our interviews, they talked us through their understanding of varied communication styles and methods to ensure user satisfaction.
As you can see from the Verify user journey pictured above, the time users are most likely to contact certified company support workers is when they are verifying their identity with the company. During our visits, we found that support workers’ knowledge isn’t limited to just their part of the user journey. Instead, they understand the user’s whole end-to-end experience, and that each service has different journeys, depending on how they’re designed. This means that users can get a seamless experience and get support with Verify as a whole, rather than go to various different channels at different parts of the journey to get help.
Support workers are also tech-savvy. On top of being knowledgeable about user journeys, they can troubleshoot issues users may be having with the technology they’re using, such as their devices or browsers, when accessing Verify. This enables them to maintain a feedback loop with the certified company’s service developers, to ensure they are aware of any temporary outages or external issues that could be affecting the user experience.
This means that support workers are also adaptable to change. They continuously train and keep informed of updates and improvements to the user journey, to enable them to continue supporting our users.
Visiting support centres proved to be an important continuation of working together with certified companies to put users first. This is one of the many ways we have engaged with certified companies to better understand each other’s ways of working, to help ensure we work together in the most effective way possible.
Our insights from this research will allow us to give recommendations to our connected services so that user support across all parts of the user journey is delivered in a consistent and effective way. This ultimately leads to a better user experience as we continually improve GOV.UK Verify in response to feedback.
To keep up to date with our progress, subscribe to the blog.
]]>I’m Joanne Southern, I work for Northumberland County Council as a Digital Team Leader. My role is to redesign and transform services within the authority.
We are one of several councils working with GDS on 2 pilot projects to transform our older people’s concessionary travel and residential parking permit services using GOV.UK Verify.
This is an exciting opportunity to work with GDS to help make our ways of working more efficient. We are looking to transform our services from manual paper-based processes to digital ones, using their tools and methods.
This is also the first time GDS have collaborated with local councils in this way. We’re all working together, sharing best practice and making some great contacts. This allows us to collectively make decisions on what the services will look like, with the aim of making them reusable by all local authorities.
At the moment, the process of applying for a residential parking permit or concessionary travel pass requires you to either visit a council customer services office and collect a form, or ring up and receive one through the post. The applicant then needs to complete the application form and supply suitable evidence to apply for the chosen service. For parking permit applications, the resident needs to provide proof of their residential address and vehicle information. For concessionary travel they are required to provide proof of residential address and age.
So, we are integrating GOV.UK Verify into the new online process to verify who people are and where they live without having to make the user manually upload documents or take information into one of our offices. We want to ensure our users have a faster and more seamless journey when using our services. This solution could then be rolled out to other council digital services, enabling residents to apply and verify themselves in a safe, simple and fast manner.
The pilots' discovery and alpha phases have involved putting a skilled team together in Northumberland to work on service design, user research and technical integration tasks. The team attended workshops and training sessions in London and Newcastle with the other pilot councils, and then set to work on completing the sprint tasks with GDS’s support. The sprint tasks have included mapping out user journeys, and using the insights gained from this to develop the future service pattern and to influence the technical solution.
Our experience of working with GDS has been really positive. They are very supportive and work at an impressive pace. The biggest benefit to us so far is the amount of training and support we have received. We have never worked in an agile manner, never done user research and never analysed service data before embarking on redesigning a service, so this has completely changed how we now work as an authority on IT projects.
The emphasis GDS puts on users being part of the project to guide the way we build the solution is something we have never done before, but we can see that it is essential that we build systems that actually meet users’ needs.
We are about to embark on our own user research in Northumberland in the next couple of weeks. We feel confident we will gather some good insights and data from our users which will really help with the development of our pilot products.
The whole Northumberland project team is approaching their work differently and getting better results because of our involvement in these pilots, and we look forward to working with GDS again on future projects.
]]>As Service Manager for GOV.UK Verify you’ll run, and continuously improve, a world-class digital service based on user needs. You’ll own and develop a vision for GOV.UK Verify, and provide direction for committed and talented multi-disciplinary teams who want to make interactions with government better through smarter use of technology.
GDS leads digital transformation in government, collaborating with teams from other departments to help them build better public services. Alongside those departmental teams, we’re transforming government together. Find out more at the GDS Blog.
GOV.UK Verify is the new way to prove who you are online. It gives safer, simpler and faster access to government services, such as filing your tax or checking the information on your driving licence, by utilising 7 identity providers, such as the Post Office, Barclays and Experian, to verify digital identities to government standards.
The service is central to the recently published Government Transformation Strategy, and is set to grow from a user base of 1 million users to 25 million by 2020. Over the coming year, the service will expand to take on additional government services, including services from local authorities. It will expand the means of assuring identities to encompass lower levels of identity proofing, as well as integration with international identity schemes to cover more people than ever before.
This is a leadership role within GOV.UK Verify for someone who lives and breathes digital transformation. The role requires a blend of vision, drive, and product and technical acumen.
It will see you working with the Verify teams and product managers, identity providers, government departments and other suppliers to achieve successful outcomes across the Verify federation. This will involve managing supplier relationships, understanding regulatory and technical constraints and making key decisions that guide the pace and direction of the programme.
We are looking for someone used to heading up lean/agile teams and who is well-versed in the successful design, delivery and operation of high profile products and services. You will promote the growth of Verify, and assist colleagues across the Civil Service and beyond who want to use Verify to assure the identity of users of their services.
This is a new phase for Verify, where we are working on more initiatives and with more pace than ever before. We want someone who is as committed to transformation as we are, and in return we will offer a friendly, supportive working environment full of people who want to make a difference.
If this sounds like you, and you would like to know more, please take a look at the full job description on the Civil Service jobs site.
For any questions about the recruitment process itself, please contact the GDS recruitment team.
Applications close on 28 March 2017.
]]>Our #VerifyLocal pilots are continuing at pace. We’re looking at how local authorities can use GOV.UK Verify for their users to securely, safely and straightforwardly verify themselves online when using local services. You can read about how we’ve been working on these pilots in earlier blog posts.
Our first 2 #VerifyLocal pilots - concessionary travel passes and residential parking permits - are being delivered in an agile way, through discovery, alpha and beta phases. The end of February 2017 marked the pilots’ transition from its discovery phase to alpha.
At the end of each phase we are collating the findings across our local authority partners and turning them into tools that can be understood and used by any local authority. We’ve done this for both residential parking permits and older person’s concessionary travel services using Verify. And we’re working in the open.
This approach allows the local public sector to track what we’re doing and see how we’re transforming local services using Verify. It also allows the local public sector to provide feedback on our work early and often.
We’ve drawn on the expertise of over 15 councils to create our discovery tools. These tools include components that can be used to build effective digital services. Other local councils looking to redesign their services can also use them. We hope to continue improving and iterating our tools through the pilots’ alpha and beta phases.
Our discovery tools fall into 4 categories below.
In the last couple of months, we’ve trained about 40 new user researchers, conducted around 150 interviews with users and helped 17 councils to understand the needs of their service users.
From this we’ve produced:
You can read more about our user research work on the GDS User Research blog.
We worked with service managers, developers and front line staff to help local authorities map out their “as is” and “to be” pilot services.
From this we’ve produced:
To help councils better understand how their concessionary travel passes and residential parking permits services could connect with Verify, we’ve also produced technical patterns with councils.
To help local authorities understand how Verify can enable digital service transformation, we’ve also produced a draft document that outlines the benefits of adopting Verify. We’re keen to keep improving this document with the input from any local council.
In the alpha phase, we’ll be improving the common prototypes for both services by testing them with users. Councils will also be building their ‘test environment’ or ‘development environment’. Once our prototypes have met the service standard and council tech teams have shown that they can configure their service effectively and securely, we’ll start the private beta phase.
We will continue to post our resources and updates on our residential parking permit pilot page, and older person’s concessionary travel pilot page.
Do you have feedback on any of our tools above? If so, we’d be happy to hear from you - please get in touch by leaving a comment or by emailing us.
]]>This blog post is an update on the progress of Warwickshire County Council’s Blue Badge pilot and the lessons we’ve learned so far in integrating our first local authority pilot service to GOV.UK Verify in private beta.
Warwickshire County Council will be trialling a new Blue Badge renewal service, which allows invited residents to renew their Blue Badge online securely and prove their eligibility, online.
This pilot project builds on the work done through the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) since 2013, which explored the need for identity assurance and eligibility checking in local authority services.
Since June 2016, Warwickshire County Council has been working with the GOV.UK Verify team to onboard into private beta. Together we’ve been developing the service design, assessing the service risks, privacy and security requirements, and building the infrastructure required to integrate with GOV.UK Verify.
Now, about 750 existing Blue Badge holders in Warwickshire will be invited to try out the new service with GOV.UK Verify in private beta. The pilot is planned to run for 3 months from March 2017.
The private beta is for current Blue Badge holders who need to renew their badges, and who previously received qualifying benefits from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Participating users of the pilot will first be asked to prove their identity using GOV.UK Verify. This gives Warwickshire County Council sufficient assurance and confidence in the identity of the user who is applying.
Then, the user will be asked to give explicit permission for Warwickshire County Council to check their eligibility online against data supplied by DWP.
Warwickshire County Council will then carry out an instant online check and will let the user know, within that same session, if they’re still eligible for a Blue Badge.
If, for any reason, the user cannot get verified, or if Warwickshire County Council is unable to confirm eligibility automatically, they will be offered alternative ways to continue with their application.
When a service delivered by one part of government depends on data held by another part of government, service delivery can be slow, expensive and frustrating for users. Following their Discovery on how government data is used, the GDS Data Infrastructure team will be examining this issue in more detail. They will particularly be focusing on online eligibility checking processes as a secure and consensual method for local and central government to share the minimum information necessary for an effective service.
The Blue Badge private beta aims to tackle this challenge. A local government service user can consent to a real-time eligibility check against central government data. This is the first pilot of this new capability. To enable this process, we’ve been working together with other partners across government to develop the standards that underpin this user-driven eligibility checking process.
Using GOV.UK Verify and having an online eligibility assessment offers an improved service that better safeguards privacy and saves time and effort for the users, who are a particularly vulnerable demographic.
For users, an online service can be done at their convenience without the need to spend time bringing, scanning or sending any identity and eligibility documents in person.
For Warwickshire, it decreases processing time and saves costs by eliminating manual checks and eligibility assessments, manual re-typing and storing of data. It also enhances the security of the service and reduces the potential for fraud.
The collaboration has uncovered a number of important lessons which we are applying as part of the onboarding and technical integration of other local authorities working on our 2 pilots. This includes improving the accessibility and relevance of the technical onboarding guide to councils. Following the pilot, we will evaluate the results and blog here on the next steps.
If you have any questions on this pilot or the other #VerifyLocal pilots, please email us.
]]>A number of private sector organisations have asked us for a way to explore and test Verify, to understand in more detail how it could work for them. To address this we are working with organisations interested in building test environments that simulate how they might connect to certified companies. These environments will enable these organisations to understand some of the implications of a private sector Verify framework, including the requirements involved in connecting to Verify and the path to live operations.
Ultimately we expect the private sector to build their own hub services that work a lot like Verify, with their own relationships to certified companies. There are currently several comparable examples in other countries such as SecureKey Concierge in Canada, EHerrkenning in the Netherlands and the BankID systems in Sweden and Norway.
This paper describes how Verify test environments could work, sets out the standards expected, and shows how organisations can demonstrate they have met them. We’ll be working on the process by which private sector organisations can come together to start testing over the next few weeks. We’ll provide updates on this process as we learn.
During this testing period, participating organisations will be able to self-certify that they comply with Verify’s standards. At this stage of testing, our aim is to understand how well the standards for GOV.UK Verify could apply in the private sector, rather than scrutinise the adoption of the standards themselves.
Private sector organisations that self-certify against the Verify standards will be listed on this page.
If you’re an organisation in the private sector interested in starting to test Verify, you can get an overview of the process we’d like you to follow here. If you’d like to know more about what we are doing, or if you have any questions then please email us.
]]>We’re looking at new ways to increase the number of services GOV.UK Verify can support, in response to growing demand from departments and users.
As of February 2017, Verify offers access to 12 central government services, all of which require strong proof that the user is who they claim to be. We’ll continue to add to these services, but in addition we’re working with government services that need less proof of identity from users.
For example, if you were claiming redundancy online, you might be asked for more evidence of your identity than if you were updating a planning application.
Services are not all the same and a one-size-fits-all approach means the high levels of security currently provided by Verify is more than some services might need. This can make dealing with government unnecessarily difficult and time consuming for users - as well as restricting how people can use Verify.
With services that need less proof from users, the user journey will be similar - but shorter. Users will be asked some questions to help them choose a certified company to Verify their identity (as they are now), but they won’t be asked for as much proof of their identity. (This shorter journey has also been referred to before as ‘level of assurance 1’, or LOA1).
Verify is designed to prioritise privacy, protect users’ identities and keep their information secure. Every service available through Verify is carefully and rigorously explored and designed to ensure the right level of security and safeguards. This will continue to be our process as we bring more services onboard. New options like this help to create a wider range of services online, that are available to the widest possible range of people, while still being safe.
We’re working now with a range of departments to research and develop these changes with new government services, and expect some of these to be available to users later in the year. In the meantime we’ll post developments on this blog, and are keen to speak to other service teams across government.
If you work on a central government service that you think may be suitable for this project, please get in touch.
]]>We’ve already shared details of how we work with companies to enable their progress. In this post, I'd like to give an update on the latest improvements.
As it stands, you can pick any one of 7 certified companies to verify your identity online: Barclays, CitizenSafe, Digidentity, Experian, Post Office, Royal Mail, and SecureIdentity. This means you have control over who has your data and there are a range of different ways GOV.UK Verify can verify you. Verizon was also on the second framework for certified companies but is no longer a certified company - they’ve not been offered as an option to users since July 2016.
Certified companies have been adding additional data sources to increase the number of users who can verify. This includes 3 certified companies that have added additional data sources to improve their coverage.
Another certified company has recently started allowing their existing customers to use the data already held as part of existing accounts as a part of the verification process. This means that if you have an existing relationship with that particular certified company, they will be more likely to be able to verify you.
It’s great to see the increase in certified companies’ ongoing work in the data sources they’re using, as it supports our ambition to make GOV.UK Verify work for more people across different demographic groups.
In addition to changes made earlier last year, which meant people can use their mobile phone contract as identity evidence in GOV.UK Verify, further updates now allow the use of passports, driving licence and national identity cards from most countries in the world.
Certified companies are also working to ensure that GOV.UK Verify works with different technologies. At the time GOV.UK Verify went live, the two biggest mobile operating systems (Android and iOS) were supported. Users with a Windows phone were offered the alternative options of receiving a security codes via landline or SMS. One of the certified companies recently launched a Windows phone app, meaning those smartphones are now supported.
Users who wish to use Universal 2nd Factor authentication to access government services can now, with one of the certified companies, use a YubiKey as a second authentication factor to sign into their identity account.
Certified companies have been reviewing the detailed actions a user needs to make in order to use their services. Three of the certified companies have rebuilt their user interface since GOV.UK Verify went live, refining the user the journey whilst incorporating new branding.
In July 2016, we blogged that we had released functionality to allow certified companies to better tailor their user journeys based on information provided by users. One of the certified companies has now implemented this feature, which means that for some users, there is less repetition of questions through the user journey. We have plans from several other companies to also start using this feature which should shorten journey times.
It’s now possible to pause and return to your verification journey with all of the certified companies - handy if you’re verifying on the go and get interrupted, or if you need to pause to find your misplaced driving licence. We’re currently researching in the lab to better understand how this is being used so that support for this can be improved across the federation.
Several of our certified companies have been working with the GOV.UK Verify team and DWP’s Universal Credit team in job centres to better understand the user journeys specific to that service. This will influence further improvements.
We set the standards for the certified companies to ensure quality, but we also encourage innovation. After all, we expect the certified companies to provide the best possible experience for users who choose to access government services online.
Subscribe to the blog to keep up to date on how we are improving GOV.UK Verify.
]]>Last month, I joined my GDS colleagues at the Digital 5 (D5) ministerial summit in Busan, South Korea.
The D5 summit is a network founded by leaders and pioneers of digital government. Collaboration helps us to build the best digital public services, and this was an opportunity for digital governments to share what we’ve learnt. I was the UK delegate representing GOV.UK Verify for a workshop on the theme of identity. This was also attended by representatives from the other D5 countries: Estonia, Israel, New Zealand and South Korea.
The aim of this workshop was to understand how different countries are approaching the need to successfully verify users’ identity as part of the delivery of digital services for government. We reviewed the way each country manages online identity and their plans for the future. We also looked at the global challenges of identity and authentication for digital services in both the public and private sector.
The D5 countries agreed to work together on areas of interest to all countries that both complement identity schemes in each country, and take into account the different ways of each country’s approach. The following priorities were agreed:
We’ll be building on the topics discussed at the summit, and there’s further potential for D5 to collaborate with the International Identity Working Group, which consists of Canada, Australia, Denmark, Israel, Mexico, Japan, New Zealand, UK, and the USA.
Subscribe to the blog to keep up to date with our progress. You can also follow Alastair on Twitter.
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