GOV.UK Verify is a trusted, secure way to prove identity online. Designed to prevent identity fraud and protect users’ privacy, it’s a safe way to make sure you’re giving the right people access to your service.
When GOV.UK Verify was first designed, the focus was on the end user experience for the service, It took months to integrate it into a service.
We knew that we needed to make it easier for teams to know:
Our ambition was to make it possible for a service owner and developer to connect.
I joined the team to help them bring together something tangible. The challenge wasn’t new and there were plenty of ideas, journey maps and prototypes exploring specific problems.
Our mission to deliver an end-to-end journey with documentation, and simpler processes was ambitious and required discipline to deliver the most impact.
We chose to take a horizontal slice through the journey to link up processes that already exist.
I ran a session to get the team to map existing processes and documentation against the journey and set up small kick-offs for each step to understand the user needs, business processes, existing work and considerations.
We built on the ideas prototyped in previous quarters but reduced them down to their minimal viable version, which in most cases means simple guidance and diagrams rather than smart forms.
We ended up prototyping the whole journey, this was the process made visible and accessible. Service owners could see exactly what is involved in connecting, designers and researchers could get access to patterns and prototypes and developers can understand what to do without having to speak to a specialist.
I'm proud of considerably reducing the amount of manual interventions needed from the GOV.UK Verify team and that we kept as much content openly accessible as possible meaning teams only had to create an account when they were ready to connect. We designed a solution that could be implemented end-to-end and created a structure to iterate on.
Have a strong vision of what you want to achieve and focus on that
