We’re redesigning the Teacher self-service portal (TSSP) to align with modern government service standards. As part of that, we’ve renamed the service ‘Access your teaching profile’.
How we got to Access your teaching profile
From the beginning, we knew we needed to rename the service to meet the GDS standard of good service names. GDS states that good service names:
- use the words users use
- are based on analytics and user research
- describe a task, not a technology
- do not need to change when policy or technology changes
- are verbs, not nouns
- not include gov department or agency names
- are not brand-driven or focused on marketing
After the first round of user research, we documented the most common words the participants were using. In the absence of analytics on the TSSP, we used these words to run a workshop within the team.
Each member of the team came up with suggested names, pitched for them and then we dot voted.
We came up with ‘Manage your career in education’ intending to validate this in round 2 of our user research.
Back to the drawing board
We presented this at the TRA show and tell with the caveat that we intended to test this name with users - we got some really good feedback from our colleagues.
It was suggested that ‘managing your career’ might be a bit grand for the service since all users can do is update personal details and get their certificates.
We were probably being too ambitious at this point. We were thinking about the future of the service and its potential functionality, rather than focussing on what it does now and starting from there.
So we went back to the drawing board using the same words we gleaned from our users. We wanted to focus more on what the service currently does but not use a name that doesn’t give room for the service to grow.
‘Get your teaching certificates’ was suggested but we felt it missed the updating details part and wouldn’t account for additional features further down the line.
Access your teaching profile
We settled on ‘Access your teaching profile’ to meet the needs of what the service currently does and what it potentially might do, without sounding too ambitious.
We tested it in round 2 of our user research with 8 participants. We asked their opinion of the name as part of the questions on the start page.
After they’d used the prototype - changed their name, downloaded certificates, and received emails we asked them again.
All agreed that it was a suitable name both at the start and at the end of the session.