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
- people who work for VCS organisations who receive requests to support families
- families who need support
All of these users will need a reference to refer to the connection request transaction.
Our design question was: ‘How might we design transaction reference numbers?’
Original design: 4 digit number
We looked at the GOV.UK design system backlog issue for transaction reference numbers.
We learned that reference numbers should:
- be clear in what they are for and what users might do with it
- have a simple, plain English name
- be short
- just use letters and digits
In our original designs for a dashboard for VCS organisation users, we included a 4 digit number as a ‘Request number’.
Exploring different formats to use
It was pointed out that with just 4 digits we would soon run out of unique numbers.
Each transaction already has a unique identifier in the back end of the service. This identifier is a 16 bit number, to comply with the Open Referral standards. We explored whether we could use this identifier, rather than having to generate a separate unique one.
The 16 bit number can be shown as a 19 digit number. A 19 digit number would be impractical for users as a reference and would take up too much space on designs.
The 16 bit number can also be shown as 12 letters. We explored using that and thought about using the format ABCD-ABCD-ABCD.
However, when we reached out to the DfE design community about this we learned that:
- assistive technology may attempt to read the letters as words
- random letter generation might lead to the reference containing words- including swear words
- we would have to suppress similar and easily confused letters
6 hexadecimal characters
We discovered we could also use the 16 bit number to generate 6 digit hexadecimal characters. Hexadecimal characters are the numbers 0 to 9, and letters A to F.
This meets the needs outlined in the GOV.UK design system backlog issue for transaction reference numbers.
We are currently testing this with users.