The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) is in the process of creating a centralised digital identity service. The need to authorise individuals to act on another’s behalf is recognised as an important use case that needs to be understood and accommodated.

With previous attempts frustrated by the complexity of the problem and constrained by current day perspectives, the DTA engaged the Customer Experience Company (CEC) to lead a ‘discovery’ phase to understand the individual customer needs and the scope of the problem.

Additionally, CEC was requested to build a case for the future digital identity work in this stream, helping the DTA secure commitment for subsequent work.

By conducting contextual inquiries with customers on both sides of the authorisation, we understood the spectrum of reasons authorisation may occur. These range from people in critical conditions to those who delegated out of convenience.

A sensitive research approach was crucial in our customer engagement, enabling us to empathise with unmet customer needs and the design implications going forward.

A sensitive research approach uncovered a spectrum of authorisation needs. In collaboration with key agency stakeholders, we redefined the scope, recognising that it was more important to understand and design for the authorisation relationships than the individuals themselves.

We developed relationship archetypes and a conceptual model for the service, which differentiated the range of distinct relationships and customer needs, taming the complexity of the problem.

We also paved the way for the following design phase, providing insights, future state experiences and customer validated recommendations including an omni-channel experience to support the digital service.

Beyond the development of outputs, we pivoted our approach to focus on socialising our findings across key agency stakeholders and other work streams, ensuring authorisation relationships would be considered beyond our initial scope of work.

By distilling a range of complex customer needs into a clear, coherent and actionable model for service delivery, we created a consensus amongst stakeholders to prioritise the individual-to-individual authorisation stream in subsequent phases.