Renew a patent, trademark and design beta re-assessment report
The report for the Intellectual Property Office's beta reassessment on the 07/10/2020.
Digital Service Standard beta re-assessment report
Renew a patent, trademark, design service
| From: | Central Digital and Data Office |
| Assessment date: | 07/10/2020 |
| Stage: | Beta reassessment |
| Result: | Met |
| Service provider: | Intellectual Property Office |
Previous assessment reports
Service description
Under it’s “Transforming the IPO Digitally” (TRIPOD) programme, the IPO will deliver a whole range of new enterprise wide digital end-to-end services for its customers.
The IP Renewals project will deliver the first of those services, providing customers with a single unified digital service for the renewal of patents, trademarks and designs including the facility to request both single and bulk renewals.
By its very nature this project will fully support a ‘channel shift’ from costly paper processing to straight through processing from the customer, where decision making on renewals is fully automated, and the complexities of manual renewals case resolution are significantly simplified or removed.
In order to deliver this form of digital transformation it is important to standardise the delivery of technology services, designed once with the sole intent of re-use across the IPO organisation and its customers to deliver excellent customer services and online experience for both individual and agents.
Service users
Unrepresented applicants
Company In house IP Services
Attorneys
Renewal Agents
Covering note
7. Understand security and privacy issues
Decision
The service met point 7 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team has clearly taken user feedback onboard to iterate the service start page to ensure users know what to expect from the service and what information they require before they begin.
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- ensure the learnings from the iterations in this service review process is embedded into the “Transforming the IPO Digitally” (TRIPOD) programme, where the IPO will deliver a whole range of new enterprise wide digital end-to-end services for its customers.
12: Make sure users succeed first time
Decision
The service met point 12 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team presented evidence of enough iterations based on user research, with multiple alternatives explored and tested at each step. The team is carrying our user research and design iteration in each sprint cycle.
- the team has been working with content designers from GOV.UK to iterate the start page of the service
- the team has updated the front end to the latest patterns of the GOV.UK Design System to achieve compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA.
- the team has run an accessibility audit and is now compliant with the WCAG 2.1 AA.
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- the team could explore conducting further research to understand if there’s a need for further integration with other parts of the service / other IPO services. For example, whether there needs to be more signposting to the channels for managing a deposit account (and where in the service this would be more valuable), or for users who wish to register a new patent but accidentally end up on the renewal start page
- whilst is great that the team is listening to users, we’d recommend reviewing the approach for backlog prioritisation. Currently it seems like this is done solely based on asking users which item they would like to be developed first. We recommend a risk based approach, taking into account which problem not being solved or feature not being implemented would have the most serious consequences.