Like all GOV.UK start pages, the start page for Check an early years qualification aims to inform users about what they can do with the service, and set them up to accomplish their task as easily as possible.
Moving the ‘Start now’ button
The ‘Start now’ button started in the position that the GOV.UK Design System suggests on the Start using a service page. During research sessions, we found that the majority of our users were clicking the green button straight away without reading the ‘Before you start’ content.
Reading the ‘Before you start’ content is useful to users as it tells them about the information they will need to answer questions in the service and the documents that will help them find that information.
We wanted to test how we could get users to read the ‘Before you start’ content before continuing to the next step in the journey. We have found that by moving the ‘Start now’ lower down the page, beneath the ‘Before you start’ section, more users have been reading this content.
Helping users to be prepared
Users rely on candidates to provide the necessary documents to answer all the questions throughout the journey.
During our research, we found this often does not happen. Typically, users only receive the qualification certificate and the candidate’s CV. As a result, they often need to gather additional information by contacting the awarding organisation, asking candidates for more documents, or searching online. This is especially the case when verifying details like the qualification start date, level, and specific requirements.
To address this, we highlighted on the start page the documents that would be helpful for users to have before entering the service, such as the qualification certificate and transcript.
Removing content
We removed the ‘Related content’ sidebar during some research sessions, to see if users would need this information, or would even read it. Our research suggested that this had not been noticed by several users in previous rounds of research.
We also removed the ‘Get more help and advice’ section. Research indicated that users were not reading this information, and were immediately selecting ‘Start now’ without reading the content lower down the page.
Where we have added more content, we have tried to do so without making the start page too wordy, for example using bullet points rather than paragraphs.
Writing for accessibility
While we have not yet conducted user research with users with identified accessibility needs, we have made efforts to make the content as accessible as possible.
We identified that some similar phrasing in our ‘before you start’ instructions may have made the content more difficult to read, for example for users who have dyslexia. We rewrote the bullet points to make them more clearly differentiated, and in the process made them more specific, benefiting all users.
Next steps
While the start page is consistently testing well with users, we will continue to look for opportunities to improve. We will be paying particular attention to opportunities to prepare users for the questions they will be asked in the service, to increase the number of users who can get to an accurate result.