https://dataingovernment.blog.gov.uk/all-service-assessments-and-self-certification/pay-penalty-online-service-assessment-2/
Pay Penalty Online - Service Assessment
The purpose of the Online Enforcement Penalty Payment Service is to provide customers who incur fines with the ability to pay those fines online, in addition to the present offerings of paying by credit/debit cards via DVLA’s Contact Centre or posting a cheque to the Agency.
Department / Agency:
DfT / DVLA
Date of Original Assessment:
22/09/2015
Date of Reassessment:
26/10/2015
Assessment Stage:
Alpha
Result of Original Assessment:
Not pass
Result of Reassessment:
Pass
Lead Assessor:
H. Garrett
Service Manager:
R. Gye
Digital Leader:
O. Morley
Assessment Report
Outcome of service assessment
After consideration the assessment panel has concluded the Pay Penalty Online service is on track to meet the Digital Service Standard at this early stage of development.
Reasons
It was great to hear about the contextual research the team had done, visiting a local library and a sheltered housing scheme to meet low skilled users. The team spoke to these users explicitly about the assisted digital support they would seek for this service.
There are plans in place for ongoing contextual research with low skilled users to further develop understanding of support needs. The team found that low skilled users often found the device and pre-start page navigation to be the most challenging parts of their user journey.
The team are investigating different methods to integrate their service with the vehicle tax and off-road notification services to help users meet the ultimate need of driving their vehicle legally.
The team should continue to iterate and test how best to meet this need with users of the service.
Recommendations
Research further with users to understand the full range of support providers they would seek support from. This will enable the team to put together a sustainable, iterable and measurable model of support that covers all users.
Recruit users who cover personas specifically created by the service team for this service. This will give full confidence that the full range of user needs is being understood.
Cover support needs whenever researching with users with any level of digital skill, confidence or access - not just those with the lowest levels. This will give a fuller idea of the volume of support required and acknowledges that even someone at 9 on the digital inclusion scale may seek or need support with this (or any) service.
Ensure the model of support covers the full user journey, from before they reach the start page, and including general challenges with technology and web navigation.
Work with the DVLA payments platform team to formalise ways to share research and to get research feedback into the payment platform backlog.
It would be helpful to hear more about how the research is integrated into the wider product team so that findings can be shared more easily. To facilitate this we would recommend the researcher working on this service spends more time physically located with the rest of the team.
Once the team have completed additional research across the personas that have been identified, it would be good to understand more about what has been learnt in relation to people’s attitudes towards tax, and how these findings have influenced future iterations of the service, and been shared across other product teams in DVLA.
Summary
It was great to hear about the research that the team have done since the last assessment, the panel would like to thank the service team for their time and well-informed answers to their questions, they look forward to seeing how the service develops.
Digital Service Standard criteria
| Criteria | Passed | Criteria | Passed |
| 1 | Yes | 2 | Yes |
| 3 | Yes | 4 | Yes |
| 5 | Yes | 6 | Yes |
| 7 | Yes | 8 | Yes |
| 9 | Yes | 10 | Yes |
| 11 | Yes | 12 | Yes |
| 13 | Yes | 14 | Yes |
| 15 | Yes | 16 | Yes |
| 17 | Yes | 18 | Yes |
