We kicked off our Inception phase for Vehicle Management and Personalised Registration in December. For those of you unaware of the concept of inception, its objectives are to understand what the broad scope of the project is, to start to get a feel for the length and duration of the development and to start thinking about what will be delivered as part of the alpha prototype and beyond into what the Beta service could comprise.
As the scope of vehicle management and personalised registration is quite wide with a variety of different users we started by developing a vision statement:
“For customers who keep vehicles and need to maintain the record, this is an online service that, unlike the existing service:
- delivers the service quickly
- provides both simplicity and accuracy
- reduces the burden, both on customers and DVLA
- we’ll know we are successful when our customers feel both informed and confident of the results of their transaction to the extent that Digital is their preferred channel"
We then brought together all the previous thinking on the subject including user research, service definitions, business requirements and the like. We started to map these against the user journeys. We also spent time with DVLA’s first digital exemplar, View Driving Record looking at lessons learnt. One of the key learnings was the need to gain an understanding of the technical complexities before we start developing. For example how we will link to legacy services or what development environment we will need.
We have also took the opportunity to step back and consider how we will verify individual and commercial users identity with the IDA Programme. We have also started thinking about our users assisted digital needs. Linked to this we developed a plan for customer insight testing, and the aim in the new year will be to prototype different versions of our services and get feedback quickly.
So what have we learnt? Firstly that there is no simple route to delivering digital services and whichever area we focus on first we will have to be able to react to a changing agenda. For example, since we started the Chancellor announced that DVLA will be abolishing the tax disc in late 2014, so we’ll have to factor that in to our development to ensure our service aligns with the vehicle tax service. Secondly, that it’s better to address the thorny issues upfront rather than leaving for another day. Lastly, that focus on users will be key to the success of our service. Whilst we all have views on how the service should look and feel we will have no idea how that will be received until we start the process of user insight and feedback.
Roll on 2014 when we start developing our alpha...
2 comments
Comment by simonfj posted on
Hi Rohan,
Just considering a place to start from your perspective. I can't help but think that one needs to be a little schizophrenic. On one side you have the old way, which is centered around using a Gov gateway ID, and the new, which, it is hoped will come out of the IDA programme.
I would have thought that you would approach this transition from a demographic perspective, where services like "apply for your (first provisional, and driver's) licence" would have be considered as one for the new user, and "renew if you're 70 or over" for the older. Starting with the vehicle a person might be responsible for, rather than defining the person's proof-of-ID method, means that you're starting in the middle of both old, & new, users' service life-cycle.
So you're immediately putting the department in a situation where they will have to support both systems (linking to legacy, or developing a new, environment ) in parallel, with the maximum amount of effort.
This will apply to all government services of course. So maybe there's a new principle. Put the user('s demographics) first.
Comment by Rohan posted on
Thank you for your comment. It's one of the challenges we will face and we will be testing our services throughout the development. Please keep an eye out on the blogs for progress of the user testing and how we adapt our service to meet the needs of a diverse user base.