Users making requests through ‘Connect families to support’ are professionals working with families. We iterated the support request form to make it easier to use.
Prompting professionals to say if there are financial difficulties
User research told us that professionals tell services if the family is going through financial difficulties. We added a prompt to share this information on the ‘Reason for the connection request’ screen, but we made it more specific:
This is a phrase that other departments use to explain what ‘financial difficulties’ means. We will test this with users of our service.
Managing expectations
Our user research has shown that:
- Families often want to tell the service as much as possible in the hope that they do not have to answer follow-up questions.
- Voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations will often do their own assessment after they have received a request.
We need to manage users’ expectations so that organisations receive enough information to decide whether or not they can provide support, but also set the expectation for families that they may be contacted further for an assessment.
We added an extra paragraph to the ‘Reason for the connection request’ screen to clarify this:
Warning users about data they should not share
Our local authority partners reminded us of their ‘data minimisation’ requirements. It would be very easy for users to put more data in the service than is necessary, or to put personal data in for people who have not given their permission.
The ‘Reason for the connection request’ screen is a point where it would be possible to enter this type of data, so we added a warning to remind people what not to do. We used a warning text component from the GOV.UK design system, with the text:
Removing reference to WhatsApp
On the ‘How can the service engage with this family?’ screen, we previously asked:
User research flagged concerns about the personal nature of WhatsApp which could give professionals access to more information than they would need. To remove the brand name but keep the idea that families might need messages over wifi, we changed this to:
Future considerations
We gathered enough evidence to make these changes, but we have not yet had a chance to test them with users. We’ll keep monitoring the performance of these changes in future user research.