In the voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisation manager ‘Add a service’ journey we had a question regarding cost: ‘Does the service cost money to use?’.
We used the GOV.UK design system radios component with two options:
- ‘Yes, it costs money to use’ which had a conditional reveal to enter the cost and the frequency - for example every hour, day, week, month, course and session.
- ‘No, it does not cost money to use’.
User research found that some VCSs charge for their services, but the costs are variable, and it is sometimes circumstance specific. The options in the prototype were not suitable in these situations.
Adding an option for variable costs
We added another radio option for ‘Yes, but the cost varies depending on circumstances’ and a conditional reveal. The conditional reveal includes hint text ‘Provide more details if you can. For example, we suggest you pay £2 every session’ and there is an optional GOV.UK design system text area component with a 150 character limit. This component allows a wide variety of potential answers.
You can explore the old cost page in version 2 and the new cost page in version 3 of our prototype (password: proto).
Future considerations
We have the same question for local authority managers in their version of the ‘Add a service’ journey. However, user research has not show that we need to change the cost options for them. We’ve left their journey as ‘it costs money’ and ‘it does not cost money’ but we will monitor this in future research and change it if we identify a need.