When we made improvements to how voluntary and community sectors add services to 'Manage', we changed the word ‘support’ throughout to the word 'service’.
Adding text to the homepage
The homepage now shows all the current actions users can take. There’s new additional text under each action heading. Under 'Add a service' this is:
Add a service to the directory
Under 'Manage your services' we added:
View, change or delete services in the directory
Asking what the service does
We changed the title of this page from 'What support does the service offer?' to 'What does the service help with?' because this language seemed more natural.
We know some of the categories do not read well following the question. We’re not worried about this currently as we know the categories are due to change.
Increasing the number of categories
We fleshed out categories using desk research by content designers and business analysts. These categories are not final, and we know they need to be consistent with 'Find' (tech requirement).
Previously the options that users could select were:
- Childcare
- Health
Now they are:
- Pregnancy and birth
- Learning and development
- Mental health
- Activities and sports
- Childcare
- Special education needs and disability (SEND)
- Parents, carers and family life
- Money and jobs
- Community, cultural and faith
We did not make any changes to the follow-up category question screen.
Asking about the delivery method
We changed the title of this page from 'How does the support take place?' to 'How can families use the service?'. We weren’t sure whether users would understand what we meant by ‘take place’. The new text is less ambiguous for this reason, and also introduces the word ‘use’ for future consistency.
The options are still:
- Face to face
- Online
- Telephone
Asking about the location of in-person support
We really struggled with this question, but we’re confident that changing it from 'Where does the in person support take place' to 'Address' means it’ll now work. We just need users to give us an address for the in-person support, so this question only shows for those who select ‘in person’. For online or telephone selections, we’ll use the address entered as part of the add organisation journey.
Removing the question which asked who it's for
We removed the ‘Who is the support for?’ question because we realised we can cover that using categories under ‘What does the service help with?’. We also realised that the ‘Who is the service for’ question is triggering for users because the list is never exhaustive (meaning we will not always capture everyone) – we’re aware that might be why we had so many suggestions in testing.
Adding a question for which asks if children or young people can use the service
'Can children or young people use the service?' question is our way of capturing age ranges. This became a separate question because we removed the previous question - 'Who is the support for?'.
Adding a question which asks if families can choose where
We introduced a new 'Can families choose where?' question because there was a strong need found in testing for users to tell us about services that let families choose this. This has yes/no options for the answer.
Asking which language the service is delivered in
We made no major changes to content here, just an updated list of languages shown in the dropdown. Business analysts did research to find the most commonly spoken languages in the UK (plus Ukrainian). We’re not sure if this is comprehensive enough.
Asking about payment
We changed the question from 'Do people pay to use this service?' to 'Does the service cost money to use?' to avoid using the word ‘people’ because it seemed kind of vague. Previously we really wanted to use the word ‘pay’ because it’s more explicit, but that’s why we chose ‘cost money’ in the new question. Anything like ‘is the service free to use’ is just too ambiguous.
We also added some more units to the list following feedback from previous user testing. We’re aware some others are missing, but we're not sure how we’ll design those. For now, users can select from payment per:
- session
- hour
- day
- week
- course
Asking how users can get in touch
This question, 'How can people contact the service?', does include the word ‘people’, which we tried to design out of the previous question. We’re not sure whether this question needs to stay in the flow because we do not need to collect contact information - professionals should use the directory itself to contact the service.
Other changes to this question include the addition of a ‘text message’ option, as well as 'email', 'telephone' and 'website', following a need found in testing. Users told us this option is important for families who do not have money to pay for mobile data.
Asking for more information about the service
This screen was previously titled 'Provide a description of this service'. We've now changed it to 'More details' and added some text to help guide users.
We know from testing that this is really important to them. It also acts as a way for us to collect information for things we did not design a specific page for.
Confirming that the service has been added
We made small changes to tidy this page up and make it clear what happens next. There’s also content to tell users they can view connections on their homepage.
The main thing we changed was the large green ‘Sent for review’ box is now ‘Service added’ because it's a better description of the action they’ve taken and we aren’t reviewing information, for technical reasons.