Renew a patent, trademark or design beta reassessment report
The report for IPO's Renew a patent, trademark or design beta assessment on the 2nd of July 2020.
| From: | Central Digital and Data Office |
| Assessment date: | 02/07/2020 |
| Stage: | Beta reassessment |
| Result: | Not 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
The service team has made an effort to address the recommendations of the previous report. It was positive to see that they have open sourced their pdf generator module and have plans to start coding in the open. The team has also considered the accessibility of the payment solution and has worked with the supplier to improve it. Within the period of 6 months, the team conducted further testing with assisted digital and novice users and gained more in depth insights of their needs.
Despite the supporting evidence provided in the assessment, understanding user needs and iterating frequently still remains a challenge for the team. Although the service meets the high level need of renewing a patent, trademark and design, there are still hypotheses that have not been tested and some design decisions seem to have been made based on assumptions (for example, that account managers will monitor the activity on their account). The team would benefit from mapping out the end-to-end journey and prioritising their testing based on the needs they have identified. In their next assessment, the team will need to outline what hypotheses, features and content they have tested and what iterations they made based on that feedback.
As presented during the assessment there are some areas in the end-to-end service design that need to be explored further. These are:
- the need to manage a deposit account and the activities in this account
- the need for a renewal reminder closer to the deadline contrary to 6 month notifications
- the need to know if there is enough money in the deposit account balance before renewing a patent
- the need to know that as a deposit account manager, they are responsible for monitoring the activity in the account
From a technical point of view, there was evidence of positive development and iteration as the service team have reviewed other platform offerings to address all scenarios for user authentication. The IPO will be working closely with BEIS and GDS to ensure that this work gets completed.
Within the IPO, there is further work to replace the payment gateway and current authentication solution which should help to provide more secure and accessible services. However, the service team was not able to give any firm timelines for when the replacement solutions will be ready.
In light of this we suggest further build and development before the service launches on GOV.UK.
1. Understand user needs
Decision
The service met point 1 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team has done research with participants with different access needs
- the team has done research with participants who could be described as “novice users”
- both user research reports provided in depth insights into some of the pain points these users encountered
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- clearly outline what is being evaluated in each research section. Although receiving feedback from users is a positive development, each research cycle needs to test specific hypotheses to ensure that you have tested your riskiest assumptions
- when doing research in which two interfaces are compared the team must identify what the variable is and what difference they expect it to make to the users’ behaviour. To aid in this the team would benefit from writing hypotheses that describe how the ideas that underpin the service design are solving the problems expressed in the team’s user needs and what change in behaviour the team would expect to see
- explore further some of the pain points that were outlined in the user research reports on error pages
- explore further the need for a reminder closer to the renewal date
- explore further the need for managing a deposit account activity
- ensure that a service designer observes the usability testing sessions
- it is unclear what the team is evaluating during usability testing. While the research has revealed problems with the interface many of the findings report the participants attitude to the experience without expanding on what those attitudes mean
- Preference is very subjective and without an explanation for the preference it’s difficult to understand what it is about an interface that makes the difference
- the team must do usability testing that evaluates how successfully the ideas that underpin the design of the service help the participants to perform the tasks required to renew their patent, trademark or design
- the team must stop reporting findings in terms of preference without an explanation for what the preference means
7. Understand security and privacy issues
Decision
The service did not meet point 7 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team has minimised the information collected from users to avoid unnecessary data being collected
- the team’s data architecture is generally robust
- the team are utilising best of breed cloud security infrastructure and patterns where possible
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- note that the panel still considers there needs to be extra work around user authentication during the payment stage to meet user needs around tracking the ownership of payments in the deposit accounts
- provide a more robust authentication mechanism for users
- consider a way to manage the risk of fraud in the service without relying on an assumption that users will actively monitor for this risk
- consider how quickly the service can be transitioned away from payment services that are nearing end-of-life
8. Make all new source code open
Decision
The service met point 8 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- since the original assessment, the service team have open sourced the PDF Generator element of the service
- the service team have challenged their organisation to reconsider the current ban on open sourcing code and intend to continue open sourcing their code in future
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- consider whether the remaining reasons for not open-sourcing code are legitimate: https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2018/11/05/11-barriers-to-coding-in-the-open-and-how-to-overcome-them/
- open source the remainder of the service.
12: Make sure users succeed first time
Decision
The service did not meet point 12 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team re-engaged the Digital Accessibility Centre to test the service for potential accessibility issues
- the team worked closely with their current payment provider to suggest improvements to better meet accessibility standards
- the team understands that the key deposit account holders are responsible for monitoring any renewal activity in their deposit accounts
Despite having done further testing with novice and assistive technology users, it was hard to understand what was iterated to better meet their needs. It remains unclear how the team works to test hypotheses and iterate frequently. Although the end to end design appears to meet the high level need of renewing a patent, other needs such as understanding your legal responsibility for managing activity in the deposit accounts and fraud prevention still poses a design security risk
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- design a mechanism of alerting deposit account managers to the fact that they are responsible for monitoring activity in the deposit accounts in order to prevent fraudulent activity
- consider a mechanism of verifying one’s deposit account balance before confirming that the patents have been renewed
- ensure that the new SmartPay product or any other payment solutions procured meet accessibility standards
- test and iterate the 6 month reminders following feedback from the usability session stating that one might forget they need to renew within the space of 6 months
- continue to test the error pages and iterate the guidance provided to users
-
simplify user journeys where possible as some steps seem unnecessary:
- the question page asking a user whether they want to download all or individual documents
- the question asking how many patents they wish to renew; and, the choice of payment options. The document download page could include a select all/none option
- the provision of one or many reference numbers for renewal could also be combined
- the choice of payment options could be limited to just credit cards for specific journeys or user types
13. Make the user experience consistent with GOV.UK
Decision
The service met point 13 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team made good use of the GOV.UK design language and are in the process of upgrading the service to be in line with the GOV.UK Design System
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- validate the usability and accessibility of the experimental accordion component and contribute their research back to the GOV.UK Design System. The team has made changes to the accordion and their research findings are invaluable to the broader design community.
- show iteration of the service. While the service team did show how they had made changes to the service, the examples were superficial. As per the previous assessment, the team did not demonstrate enough iteration of the service based on user research.
- continue to update your patterns following GOV.UK Design System releases