Prove your identity

Discovery
Interaction design
Prototyping

Introduction

How might someone prove their identity online?

Organisation:: Ministry of Justice
Sector:: Public
My role:: UX Designer
Responsibilities:: Workshop facilitation, interaction design, prototyping
Phase:: Alpha

Discovery

To kick off this project, the team did some discovery work into existing ID patterns. The NHS and Post Office EasyID apps both use patterns that we were able to learn from.

NHS app

Easy ID app

Interaction design

I sketched a number of ways to prove identity. The first iteration had three options that we could begin testing with users:

a passport check
a driving licence check
a bank account check (via open banking)

From there we wanted to aim for a more inclusive set of options catering to both online and offline scenarios. We also wanted to include options for people of various levels of digital literacy, so we added:

a Universal Credit account check
a Government Gateway account check
knowledge based verification
get someone to vouch for your identity
directions for offline identity verification

We iterated a number of times on the design and identification methods, testing each iteration with users.

The final version I designed and prototyped used a pattern where the user selects which ID options they have available to them. The service then evaluates their options and takes them through the two options that give the highest assurance according to GPG45.

Inclusive identity options

The main objective of this identity work is to provide an inclusive set of options so that every person has at least one means of being identified successfully. It is possible that some people won't have a driving licence, won't have a valid passport, won't do online banking etc. so we included an option to get someone within a list of professions to vouch for you.

Offline options have also been included for users with lower digital literacy, who might prefer to use the paper process.