Making identity verification work for online services
My role: Lead user researcher
My team: Service manager, designers x2, junior user researchers x2
Social welfare product team: User researcher, designer, business owner, data scientist
Context:
I worked as part of a multi-disciplinary team within an online identity verification program, adopted by large-scale government services. A UK social welfare service approached us wanting to understand more about their own users’ experience when trying to prove their identity online.
Brief:
Why are social welfare claimants showing a high drop-out rate when trying to prove their identity online?
Outcomes
Implemented improved user flows, leading to an increased number of social welfare claimants successfully verifying their identity.
Trained 2 junior user researchers on how to conduct and analyse contextual user research.
Delivery of actionable insights to multiple stakeholder groups into causes behind high drop-out rate for social welfare claimants.
Began cross-departmental user research and design collaboration, which continued and expanded to other programs.
Introduced a new contextual, end-to-end approach to user research within the identity verification program.
Process
What did I need to consider for this research brief?
The team required contextual visibility into reasons why users were dropping out.
To do this, we needed to find social welfare claimants who had previously attempted, but failed, to verify their identity.
To triangulate the self-reported data, we also needed to observe this group of users trying to verify their identity.
This was a sensitive journey and context with a vulnerable user group.
There were strong stakeholder assumptions for user drop-off - that they were unmotivated to complete the journey.
With no previous end-to-end research with the involved teams, this investigation introduced new levels of transparency and collaboration between the government departments.
I chose to conduct 4 days of intercept research at an employment services centre, together with the social welfare digital team.
We discreetly based ourselves in a corner and invited claimants who had previously tried to verify their identity to voluntarily take part in a recall interview of their experience.
For those claimants who were comfortable and willing to do so, we also conducted live observation of them attempting to verify their identity online.
These steps were taken in close collaboration with the centre’s staff. We held daily de-briefs and interviewed staff members to collect their own knowledge around users’ issues.
The above methods allowed for a rich collection of insights into the reasons behind social welfare claimants failing to verify their identity.
I held group analysis sessions with different stakeholders to synthesise the findings.
I then delivered tailored findings to the relevant stakeholders to action - those who worked on my immediate team, those on the social welfare service, and other 3rd parties.
The findings generated hypotheses for my team to test in our fortnightly user labs.
Our iterative, agile approach led to the resulting improvements feeding smoothly into product development.