The School Account work is made up of two services.
- An internal facing service currently called the Task and Service Index (TSI) . As the name suggests, this is an index of tasks and services that have been collected and refined by the policy and business team.
- An external facing service for school business professionals (SBPs) that takes its data from the TSI and displays it in a way that is useful to the SBPs.
The external service is referred to as ‘School Account’ as this is the name of the project that encompasses both services. As the external service is developed further it has become a less fitting name. We also need a decent url to host the service on in the new year (2024) - time to address that name!
Rewind to 2022 – Alpha phase
During the alpha phase the previous project team did some workshops around what the service might be named. These workshops followed the service manual guidance for naming, the standard process used in naming services across all government organisations.
You can find out the details of that work in the alpha phase post called [naming the service]. The result, however, was “inconclusive” and so no name was put into use.
Back to now - Beta phase
Interaction designer Steve O’Connor was given the task of organising the naming work, with support from content designer Lisa Matthews.
After reviewing the alpha phase research and having gained a good understanding of the aims of the service, we made the decision to use a more traditional branding agency approach. Steve has experience with branding and so put together a format for two workshops designed to encourage naming ideas from the team.
Workshop One (3 Nov 2023)
The goal of this workshop was to get everyone in alignment and thinking in the right space.
First, we refreshed everyone on what had already been done as well as what we knew of the project and it’s goals. We then asked questions to explore thoughts and reach consensus, bringing everyone into alignment on why we were doing it now, who the external service was for, and what it was.
We also asked what principles people thought the service needed to represent, using a selection of options from the Brand Deck, a tool Steve has used in branding sessions before with great success.
The outcome
Why now? • When we become a stand-alone service, we need a name for users so they understand where they are and what they are doing. • We need an ownable url ASAP! • It's out in the open so it needs a proper name now. • Start to build familiarity.
Who is it for? School business professionals including: • CEOs and head teachers • Finance, HR, legal, and procurement personnel • Business managers
What is it? An external platform which pulls everything a user might need to do into one place. Service principles: • Dependable • Standardised • Helpful • Simple • Practical
Take a look at the workshop one Lucid board
Workshop Two (10 Nov 2023)
We ran this workshop exactly one week later – just long enough to let the previous workshop percolate in people minds. The purpose of this session was the extract words, ideas, and anything else that could be used to create a service name.
To help with this we set up some exercises designed to get people thinking about it in different ways. After this session we continued to encourage people in the team to go back to the board in their own time to add more.
Workshop outputs
There were a huge variety of names and ideas that came out of the workshop. Take a look at the board to see more of them.
Take a look at the workshop two Lucid board
After some internal discussions the decision was taken to take five options into research with users:
- DfE Connect
- Get help with school management
- My School Gateway
- Education Link
- View my school actions
The results of the research will be in a future design history post.