Capturing contact preferences and details

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.

Our design question was 'How might we capture families’ contact preferences and contact details, to give VCS organisations the information they need?'

Original designs

In the original designs, we used the contact preferences pattern recommended on the GOV.UK design system backlog issue to collect contact details - with the modification allowing for users to select multiple methods. In this pattern, users select contact methods and provide contact details on the same page.

Users were then prompted to include details about ‘times of the day to contact the family’ as part of their free text entry response to give further details about why the family was seeking support.

Information that voluntary and community sector organisations need

From user research with VCS organisations, we learned that they want to know about:

• the best day and time to contact
• the preferred method for contact
• any communication needs - such as interpreters or textphone

Adding a question about how the service can engage with the family

To collect this further information, we added a free text entry question on a separate page using the text input component from the GOV.UK design system. As per the pattern for a complex question page, the page has a H1 title, and then a question above the text input box.

The content was:

We considered using structured input for the preferred method and best day and time. We decided to use a free text box as this allows users to add:

• complex information about availability such as ‘call after 3 on a Monday but after 2 Tuesdays to Thursdays’
• unstructured information like ‘they won’t answer their phone to unknown numbers, text first’
• detail to explain where discretion might be required, such as ‘do not make any other family members aware of this request’

We can also learn from the free text that users enter to inform how we could structure input in the future.

We phrased the question as ‘How can the service engage with the family?’ to make clear that it’s not just about contacting the family, but building a relationship with them.

This has tested well in user research. Users understand what information we are asking for.

Capturing address and using a different pattern to collect contact details

From user research, we learned that:

• some families may change phone number a lot
• not all users were confident using a phone or email

In these cases, a service might write a letter to contact them. This meant we now wanted to capture the family’s address to make the service more inclusive.

Using the previous component where methods and details were captured on the same page, adding address would have made it longer and more complex. Including the address with the previous conditional reveal checkbox would also make errors more complicated for the user if all options are selected. We decided to separate email, Telephone, Text message and Letter on separate pages as this is one question per page and reduces cognitive load for the user.

Instead, on the first page users now select their preferred contact methods. We’ve used the GOV.UK design system checkbox component for this. We then ask for the contact details for the methods selected on following pages, using the standard patterns from the GOV.UK design system for each. Users are only asked for the contact details for the methods they have selected. Each contact method is a separate pages as this reduces cognitive load for the user. We will continue to test and iterate this.

Collecting preferences about WhatsApp

We also learned from user research that many families may use WhatsApp rather than text messages. If the family do not have credit on their phone, they can still message using WhatsApp over free wifi.

We added a bullet point to the ‘How can the service engage with ’ page to prompt professionals to tell us if families ‘would prefer to receive messages via WhatsApp’. We will continue to test and iterate this.