Our users are professionals who use ‘Connect families to support’ to complete a form to request a voluntary and community sector (VCS) service contacts a family. They may want to look back at the request they have made, and they will want to know if the request has been accepted or declined.
The information shown in the request is populated by the information entered on the request form.
Our design questions were:
- how might we show users a list of connection requests they have sent?
- how might we help users to find a connection request they are looking for?
- how might we show users updates to connection requests they have sent?
We have also explored how we should keep professional users updated on their requests.
Original design for dashboard and search
When we started these designs, we had already designed and tested the dashboard for VCS users. We used some of the learning from that to inform the design of this dashboard. The design is very similar, but with different fields shown in the table, to account for the different user needs.
The fields shown in the table on the dashboard, in order from left to right, are:
- contact in family, on the request for support form this field is called ‘Person in family to contact’ however this is too long a heading for the table
- service, the service the connection request was sent to
- date updated, allows users to sort requests and we assume they will want to do this
- date sent, we’ll be researching whether this is important to users
- status
- request number
The statuses are:
- ‘sent’ for a request a professional has sent, but has not been accepted or declined yet
- ‘accepted’ for a request a VCS organisation has accepted
- ‘declined’ for a request a VCS organisation has declined
We’ve used the tag component from the GOV.UK design system to indicate status.
We’ve added sorting to:
- date updated
- service
- status
- date sent
We’ve added functionality for a user to search by name of contact because we assume this is the primary way they would identify and look for requests. We will test this assumption.
We will test further with users to find out how they expect the dashboard to be ordered, and how they would find a specific request.
Iterating to descope search and add sort to contact in family
The original designs we built included functionality to search by ‘contact in family’. We initially agreed this would be part of our minimum viable product (MVP). We have not yet been able to test this functionality with users, but we have tested how VCS users would find connection requests on the VCS dashboard.