Content designer: Ivy Halstead-Dawber
Interaction designer: Steve O'Connor
We currently have a selection of mandatory finance tasks published on the manage your education and skills funding (MyESF) service.
We are moving this content to our standalone service, DfE Connect. Before doing this, we have made some content and design changes.
Current MyESF content 
Deadline changes
The column for the relevant date for tasks is called 'Deadline' on MyESF. We have changed this to 'Date' because not all the dates are deadlines. Some are the date that an update is happening, some are dates that the task is available. Therefore 'deadline' is not accurate. We've utillised the task descriptions to make it clearer what the date refers to.
We also showed the date for each task individually rather than grouping the tasks with the same date together in one row of the table. This is because some research and analytics showed that users view everything in the same row as one single task, rather than several different tasks with the same date.
Task name changes
We amended the task names to start with active verbs, making it clearer what the action is that the user needs to do.
We also created more consistency between all the task names by making sure to always use active voice and refer to users as 'you' rather than 'academies' or 'school business professionals'.
MyESF version of the task descriptions 
DfE Connect version of the task descriptions 
Tabs for upcoming and past tasks
Upcoming and past tasks are now separated using tabs at the top of the page rather than having the past tasks listed underneath the upcoming tasks.
Having past tasks at the bottom of the page increases the risk of users missing the information, especially when we expand the list of upcoming tasks. Tasks are listed in date order, so it is possible a user may only scroll down until a certain date, not releasing there are past tasks further down.
All the tasks on DfE Connect are mandatory so, if a user has missed a deadline, they still need to complete the task. We want to ensure they have easy access and visibility to these tasks.