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.
To comply with data protection rules, the professional must have permission from the family they are working with to share their details with a support service.
Our design question was 'How might we check that a professional has permission to share a family’s details?'
Original designs
In the first iteration of the design, when making a connection, users were asked if they had ‘consent from the family’. We used the radio button component from the GOV.UK design system for users to select whether they had consent.
The content was:
You must have consent from the family to give their details to the service.
Those details include:
- who to contact in the family
- ways to contact the family
- why the family needs help
You can come back and connect the family to the service once you have consent.
Do you have consent from the family?
What we learned about the word ‘consent’
We received input from user research, our local authority partners and codesign group that the use of the language ‘consent’ was confusing. ‘Consent’ could be interpreted to mean a number of different things including consent to share details, consent to begin work, and consent to store data.
'Consent' changed to ‘permission to share’
In the next iteration, we changed the language from ‘consent’ to ‘permission to share details’ to make clearer what we are asking. The content is now:
You must have permission from the family to give their details to the service.
Those details include:
- who to contact in the family
- ways to contact the family
- why the family needs help
You can come back and connect the family to the service once you have permission.
Do you have permission from the family?
This has tested well in user research. Professionals understand what they are being asked.