Register to Vote: Overseas Electors & EU Citizens Journey Alpha Assessment
The report for the Register to Vote: Overseas Electors & EU Citizens Journey alpha assessment on the 31 March 2022
Service Standard assessment report
Register to Vote: Overseas Electors & EU Citizens Journey
| From: | Central Digital & Data Office (CDDO) |
| Assessment date: | 31/03/2022 |
| Stage: | Alpha |
| Result: | Met |
| Service provider: | DLUHC |
Service description
The Register to Vote Service is an existing service which allows citizens to apply to register to vote. Electoral Registration is managed at a local level by Electoral Registration Offices. After a citizen has applied online to register to vote, the Register to Vote Service uses an integration with DWP to run a match on the National Insurance Number (NINO), name and date of birth, then passes the application on to the relevant Electoral Registration Office, through an API which is called by Electoral Management Systems (EMSes).
Updates to the Register to Vote service are required following policy changes in the Elections Bill which change the franchise rules that determine which Overseas Electors and EU citizens can register to vote.
Flows through the existing Register To Vote service are incompatible with the new requirements for OE and EU users, and without interventions, the new requirements will increase ERO burden.
Service users
-
Citizens applying to register to vote. For this Alpha we are specifically looking at two subgroups of citizens applying to register to vote:
- Overseas Electors
-
EU Citizens
- Electoral Administrators
1. Understand users and their needs
Decision
The service met point 1 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that the team had:
- worked with stakeholders to identify areas where bad risky assumptions would have the most impact on users
- tested the riskiest assumptions early through hypothesis-driven design and research
- done a lot of research with a range of methodologies across their target groups
- developed a good understanding of overseas electors and EU citizens and their pain points
- showed examples of influencing and engaging policy and decision makers with user needs throughout alpha
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- continue to influence the Electoral Commission who are responsible for offline journeys for users, making sure insights are shared. Test the offline journeys to understand how users switching between the two may be impacted
- expand upon the team’s initial work to understand users with access needs and how they use the service
- ensure the team has validated the needs and paint points for the Electoral Registration Officer user group
2. Solve a whole problem for users
Decision
The service met point 2 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team have a really good awareness of the overall user journey front to back & end to end. They were very clear what parts of the user journey they have responsibility for, and where they can use their soft influence to ensure consistency across channels
- the team had already been joining up with GOV.UK content teams to ensure the changes that will be required to the start pages are cited and the team already have plans to continually test & iterate the start page
3. Provide a joined-up experience across all channels
Decision
The service met point 3 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the paper form is not in the direct control of this team, however the panel was impressed with the ways of working and the design recommendations the team had made to this team
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- continue working with the Electoral Commission team responsible for the paper form to ensure consistency across channels and to ensure you are all working to the same deadlines
- similarly the back office caseworking system to be used by EROs is not within the control of the team, however ensuring there is consistency and join up will become of increasing importance.
4. Make the service simple to use
Decision
The service met point 4 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team is engaged with the Digital Identify programme since it’s very clear how these future products would significantly improve the user journeys
- the team had strongly evidenced the usability of their service with Summative testing
- the service aligns strongly with design system patterns. Iterations were clearly documented & the rationale clear
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- the team were well aware the document upload section of the user journey would likely be the most challenging part of the journey for users to complete. The team should seek to gain as much insight from beta in order to optimise this design, for example the team may wish to investigate if certain documents have a higher success rate and nudge users to these pieces of evidence first
- due to the need to upload documents, its rational that users will need to complete the journey in multiple sessions. The team should think about how they intend to measure that in order to identify if they need to undertake any additional design work
5. Make sure everyone can use the service
Decision
The service met point 5 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- assisted digital and accessibility has been considered throughout the Alpha phase and Accessibility testing for Beta has been commissioned
- as above, the team are feeding insight in regards to the paper form to the Electoral Commission
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- as planned, conduct accessibility testing. Ensure compliance and publish accessibility statement
6. Have a multidisciplinary team
Decision
The service met point 6 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- there is a multidisciplinary team for the alpha and the team will continue to work on the private beta
- the team engage with relevant expertise, such as policy and legal,
- the team has consider how they will work with the other supplier in private beta and have a plan to transition the service to to DLUHC and provide ongoing support
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- review how well the collaboration and knowledge share between suppliers and DLUHC is working and make adjustments as needed
- consider whether they have enough access to a performance analyst and ensure they are bringing in that expertise at the right time
7. Use agile ways of working
Decision
The service met point 7 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team showed good agile practices, using appropriate tools to facilitate collaboration and retrospectives to make incremental improvements to their working practices
- the team has a good grasp on who their wider stakeholders are and are engaging them at appropriate times
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- continue to iterate their working practices and adapt to the challenges that working with another supplier will bring
8. Iterate and improve frequently
Decision
The service met point 8 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team has clear structured processes to evaluate and prioritise work coming into the team
- has a good feedback loop so that user research findings and recommendations are being added into future iteration
- there are ongoing plans to do further research to iterate and improve the service
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- ensure that there is a feedback loop between the team and the supplier working on the ERO platform
- ensure that analytical insight is embedded within the team’s agile ways or working, this will help the team have confidence in the changes they plan to make throughout private beta
9. Create a secure service which protects users’ privacy
Decision
The service met point 9 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the service retains as little data as possible before handing it off to ERO services
- the team is thinking about how proactive activity monitoring can be integrated into the service to protect users from fraud
- the team has given deep thought about the tradeoffs in the verification approach
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- evaluate the cost-benefit of exposing counter-fraud data to the EROs
10. Define what success looks like and publish performance data
Decision
The service met point 10 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the service is part of a wider Register to Vote service and, as such, the performance data collected and published are already quite mature
- they are clear about what their service goals and key performance indicators are and know how they will measure it
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- ensure that they have access to a performance analyst
- use data from both the user journey and the ERO journey to feed into improvements for the service and be able to measure whether changes to the user journey are impacting the ERO processing time
11. Choose the right tools and technology
Decision
The service met point 11 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the service builds and enhances on the existing Register to Vote service
- the team takes into account the necessary “spikiness” of the service’s traffic profile in choosing their technologies for quick scaling
- the service is decoupled from downstream consumers to prevent cascading failure and allow consumers to process messages at their own rate
- the authentication parts of the service use off-the-shelf components to provide features like a second factor
12. Make new source code open
Decision
The service met point 12 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team has published code that is safe to do so
- the team’s private code is kept private for good reasons
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- consider whether it would be possible in future to publish the remaining closed-source code, and how to make that happen
13. Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns
Decision
The service met point 13 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team used off-the-shelf design system components
- the service utilises platform-provided features for login and issuing client certificates rather than deploy their own
- the team architected their service around queues for decoupling, meaning the user will experience a faster frontend journey rather than waiting for synchronous calls
14. Operate a reliable service
Decision
The service met point 14 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team uses AWS Lambda as a way of coping with irregular traffic profiles
- the support plan running up to the registration deadline is tailored to expectations from the public
- the service leans on other teams to provide out-of-hours security monitoring in their platform accounts
- the service stores state in such a way that in the unlikely event of an inability to publish downstream, a user should be able to refresh and try again
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- the team runs a light incident drill to make sure incident management processes are in place and well understood