Our users work for voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations which receive requests to support families from professionals through our service. They must then decide whether to accept the request and contact the family to offer support, or to decline. They need the right information to make the decision.
Our design questions were how might we:
- show VCS organisation users the family’s details sent by the professional?
- give a VCS organisation enough information to make a decision?
- enable VCS organisation users to respond to a connection request?
Original design
The heading level 1 for the page is the request number, as this will be a unique header for each request details page.
We’ve added the fields to correspond with how data is collected in the request form. We’ve used the GOV.UK Design System summary list component to show the name, email, telephone number and address of the person in the family to contact.
The information for ‘Reason for the connection request’ and ‘How the service can engage’ is shown as headers with body text underneath, to display the up to 500 characters of free text data submitted.
We’ve included details on the professional who has requested support as we know from user research that the VCS organisation may want to contact them to discuss the request.
The details included for the requester are:
- name
- phone number
- role
- team
This information will be collected when the professional’s user account is created, and then attached to the request when it’s sent.
In the first round of user testing, users indicated that the level of information provided met their needs to take take action. We will be continuing to test this further.
Responding to a request
At the bottom of the details page, users have options to respond to the request. The level 2 heading for this section is ‘Your response’. We’ve used the GOV.UK radio button component for users to select their options.
We have given users 2 options to respond:
- Accept - our service will contact this person to offer support
- Decline - our service will not offer support
We’ve used the word ‘decline’ as it has more positive connotations than ‘Reject’. Reject is defined as ‘to refuse to accept, submit to, believe or make use of’. Decline is defined as ‘to express polite refusal’.
We’ve included a free text entry box for users to add detail about why they have declined the request as a required field. This is based on an assumption that professionals would want to know why their requests were declined.
Confirmation pages
For the ‘accept’ journey confirmation page, we have used the confirmation page pattern from the GOV.UK design system. For the ‘decline’ journey confirmation page we’ve used a simple text page.
Indicating the status of the request
We’ve used the GOV.UK Design System tag component to indicate the status of a request on the request details page. This is the same as we have used on the dashboard for VCS organisation users and will show the same statuses of opened, accepted or declined.
Iterating the confirmation pages
For the ‘accept’ journey confirmation page, we used the confirmation page pattern from the GOV.UK design system. For the ‘decline’ journey confirmation page we’ve used a simple text page.
From user testing, we learned that once users have accepted a request, they want to go back to the request details page so they can contact the person or copy their details.
We iterated the ‘accept’ journey confirmation page to include a call to action button using the button component from the GOV.UK Design System. The call to action text we've used is ‘View connection request’.
We will test this with users to see if it meets their need.