https://dataingovernment.blog.gov.uk/your-tax-account-service-assessment-2/
Your Tax Account - Service Assessment
Your Tax Account is the service through which small and medium businesses will interact with HMRC for all their needs. It provides a personalised homepage allowing users to view the information most important to them, do the things they need to do in one place, and link them to other services and opportunities pertinent to their individual circumstances.
Department / Agency:
HMRC
Date of Assessment:
23/3/2015
Assessment stage:
Live
Result of Assessment:
Pass
Lead Assessor:
E.Stace
Service Manager:
O.McGuire
Digital Leader:
M.Dearnley
Assessment Report
Outcome of service assessment
After completing the assessment, the assessment panel can confirm that the Your Tax Account service has shown sufficient evidence of meeting the Digital by Default Service Standard and should go Live as a Digital by Default service on GOV.UK. The service can remove Beta branding once the performance platform dashboard (which is currently under development) is published showing data for the KPIs.
Reasons
The service was assessed against and has met all 26 points of the Digital by Default Service Standard
The assessment panel believe that the service has made good progress since the early stages of Beta development and found it particularly reassuring to see how much user research had been undertaken and improvements made to the service as a result.
The panel found that the service team were working well alongside other digital service teams in HMRC and were also following well understood agile processes which will help ensure that the service continues to iterate and improve once it is Live.
Considerations around security, data privacy and suitable technology standards were found by the panel to be well understood by the team, as well as by those that support them in the wider HMRC organisation. The development of this service is already benefiting from wider support across HMRC.
The panel found the visual design to be a good example of a service built within the GOV.UK style and were pleased to see that content design effort was being used to ensure that complex tax language was being made as easy to understand as possible by users of the service.
Individual services available through Your Tax Account are responsible for developing their own assisted digital support and digital take-up plans for their specific services. The panel found that the Your Tax Account service team had undertaken significant research into potential assisted digital users of this specific service and had not identified a need for assisted digital support. The team had spoken to representative bodies, enterprise networks and relevant charities, worked with HMRC’s contact centre and had run focus groups with a variety of users across different industries. The service team’s research showed that businesses use agents to complete their digital services for other reasons than lack of digital skills and access.
There is no existing offline equivalent of this service. The service team have a plan to migrate user groups of relevant digital services to Your Tax Account over the next year.
The service had Google Analytics Premium implemented and have set up suitable goals to track task completion rates as it pertains to Your Tax Account. The team demonstrated the ability to iterate service design based on digital analytics and user research data.
Recommendations
The panel believe that the service should ensure that their performance platform dashboard is published as soon as possible, and before beta branding is removed. The dashboard should include data on all KPIs, including data on completion rates derived from the goals set up in Google Analytics.
The panel also believe that the service team should consider the following as part of the on-going development of the service:
This service was described in the service assessment as “hub” service, meaning that users land on this information page before advancing to other transactional services within the wider HMRC service landscape. These are services for which the service manager of Your Tax Account is not responsible for. This provides a significant challenge to the principal role of the service manager, who should have full responsibility and accountability for digital service, including all related processes. This, together with the difficulty of collecting meaningful analytics across the full user journey, make it difficult to quantify and track the success metrics of this service.
The service manager should work with other service teams to more clearly articulate the shared responsibilities for improving this service and invest in a digital analyst who should be co-located with the service team with responsibility to improve analytical data and insights across the entire customer journey. This individual would be responsible for managing the Google Analytics configuration, optimising the digital analytics implementation and identifying actionable data insights to provide candidates for further service design iteration. The cookie statement should properly reflect the current version of Google Analytics (i.e Universal Analytics).
Specific design recommendations were sent to the service team under separate cover.
The panel advise that the service team continue to monitor potential need for assisted digital support as more user groups are migrated to the service. As new digital services are added to the portal, the team should ensure that there is a consistent assisted digital user journey across those services.
Summary
In summary, the assessment panel were pleased to report that the service, once the performance dashboard is delivered, is ready to progress to live.
The panel would like to take this opportunity to thank the team who attended the assessment at Aviation House for providing clear, evidence-based answers to their questions, and the panel enjoyed seeing the results of their hard work.
Digital by Default 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 |
| 19 | Yes | 20 | Yes |
| 21 | Yes | 22 | Yes |
| 23 | Yes | 24 | Yes |
| 25 | Yes | 26 | Yes |
