Prototyping a digital taxi licensing service

Contents:

Taxi drivers and companies require a licence to operate. To acquire and retain their licences they need to know what information to provide and when, to ensure the licences they hold remain valid and lawful. Licence holders interact with these processes intermittently and struggle to take appropriate action independently and at the right time.

Licensing staff meet this need by contacting licence holders, by phone or email, to notify them when information or tasks are due. This situation has challenges in communication and invariably leads to errors, lost time and frustration for both licence holders and licensing teams. In acute cases this can result in taxi drivers unable to work.

Research shows that licence holders expect all this to be possible online but no collaborator has found a viable market solution to meet this need.

This alpha project, led by Rushmoor Borough Council, will test a prototype licensing service to see if it meets user needs and is scalable.

Project outputs

The alpha phase will:

create a research plan to test the five hypothesis of the alpha phase
map user journeys for each Licensing service, create user stories, prioritise user needs and product capabilities for prototyping
explore collaborator technical environments, requirements and constraints, including council DDaT team needs for digital service implementation
explore differences in needs, priorities, processing and technology and their potential impact on service/product design and implementation
test technical and non-technical concepts and prototypes with stakeholders as appropriate including licence holders, licensing officers, support system administrators and suppliers
document our research, participation, prototypes, testing, results and findings in a final user research report
create an interactive, shareable, tested digital service prototype for each collaborator
identify measures required to optimise and evaluate the product, including the user experience, to support iterative improvement
present project conclusions with next steps and product roadmap
produce a benefits case for any potential beta project
create shareable communication media throughout

Project links

Project timeline

March 2023

The project is awarded £138,150 in funding through Round 6 of the Local Digital Fund to begin an alpha phase.

Go to Local Digital homepageALPHA