Capturing the reason for a connection request

Our users are professionals who use ‘Connect families to support’ to complete a form to request a voluntary and community sector (VCS) service contacts a family.

Our design question was ‘How might we capture the right detail for a VCS organisation to be able to decide whether to accept or decline a request?’

Original designs

In the original designs, we used a free text entry box using the text input component from the GOV.UK Design System to capture the details. The content was:

Information that voluntary and community sector organisations need

From user research with VCS organisations, we learned that they want to know:

• if any other organisations are currently working with the family
• whether they need to be aware of any mental health conditions, special educational needs or disabilities
• whether they need to be aware of domestic abuse

Iterating the content and the name of the page

We know that users will want to give us lots of information. There is another free text entry box in the service where we ask users for information about how to engage the family. We wanted to make clear what information to give in this box.

We changed the name of this page from ‘Details about the family’ to ‘Reason for the request for support’ to make clear that this is the place for the professional to describe the reason for requesting support.

We updated the bullet point prompts to match the information VCS organisations have told us they need. The new content is:

We tested this and found users have a better understanding of the information we want them to give (in comparison to the previous design).