We moved away from asking users to enter all the services they offer, and then giving them a task list, to entering the name of the service. We decided to drop the task list because users found it confusing.
We also moved away from the ‘tell us everything about all your services’ approach to just tell us about one service at a time.
This meant that the ‘Select types of support screen’ moved to later in the journey, and we brought the ‘name of service’ screen earlier.
Redesigning the homepage
We made the homepage easier to follow in anticipation for future actions we’ll include. We changed it from a single page of 'Add details about the support you offer' to a dashboard where users can 'Add a service'. This is more in line with other Department for Education services like the ‘Recruit an apprenticeship service’.
Asking users to select the support they offer
We introduced a two-level approach to categories. The first screen of 'Select the support you offer' asks users to select the general category of either ‘childcare’ or ‘health’. Then we ask for more information about the categories the user selected by using follow-up screens depending on their selection. For example if a user selected childcare, the next screen would ask them 'What childcare support does the service offer?'. They can then select from:
- After school club
- Breakfast club
- Day nursery
- Parent and toddler group
- Pre-school playgroup
We did research to understand how local authorities do this now. This approach better reflects this and allows us to collect more detailed info about the support offered.
Asking how the support takes place
The following screen asks users 'How does the support take place?'. We've changed 'Face to face' to ‘In person’.
This language was used by users in testing, and they felt ‘in person’ was more descriptive for actually going to a physical place to receive support.
We also got some feedback from users that there’s a distinction we’re missing between whether support is delivered face to face and online, as opposed to face to face OR online. Users called this ‘hybrid’. The previous options we gave them did not meet that need. We agreed to wait for more clarity and findings from testing before making changes to this.
We also switched radios buttons out for checkboxes here (the 'In person' one expands to let users enter an address) in anticipation for other types of locations or places.
Some users pointed out that we needed options for 'family’s home', or 'client’s choosing/safe space'. To meet that need, we added a specific radio to capture that information: ‘The family’s home’.
Users also pointed out that a service might have more than one address. We agreed to not address this need right now and wait for more research to flesh out that need.
We also changed the radio text from showing a pre-populated service address to one where the user would need to enter it themselves. This is because we thought it could be jarring for users, and we were also unsure at which point in prior journeys we’d collect this information.
Asking who the support is for
We had issues in testing where users tried to tell us all the people we’d missed from the list on the 'Who is the support for?' page. Because of that, we tried to expand this list. We decided to keep as is for now and wait for more research to show who else might need to be included.
After clicking on ‘children’, one user tried to enter the age to and from age in one free text box. To stop that happening again, we switched to a dropdown component.
Adding languages
On the 'Which language is the support offered in?' page, users asked us for a way to add more than one language. Because of that, we introduced an ‘Add another language’ button, which we’d seen used across government. We also made some small content changes.
Asking about payment
Users told that 'Do people pay to use the service?' is the most important question for families. A user said they’d call the service if they could not see information about how much the service costs (when they’re referring). Because of that, we added a way for them to give us the amount and the unit of cost.
Adding a description box
Users pointed out that without a description box to add more details about the service, the whole form is ‘pointless’. They noted that this would give them space to talk about anything else, including benefits of their service. For that reason, we added a free text box to version 3.