What is GOV.UK Notify?
GOV.UK Notify allows digital teams to create, personalise and send email notifications to their service users. Once our service is integrated with the Notify API, we can send automatic email notifications to our users.
As a digital team, we needed to investigate the process for creating and sending emails to our users to make sure we can properly integrate it into our service.
What notifications do our users need?
Following the service manual’s guidance for emails, we need to restrict the use of emails to transactional messages. These can include:
- confirmation of actions that a user has taken on the service
- alerting a user when something needs their attention
We want to make sure our service meets these needs without overwhelming our users with email. To do this, we went through our end-to-end service maps, identified any actions that would trigger a notification to be given to a service user, and recorded those actions on this spreadsheet along with their user need. Where possible, notifications will be served by a banner instead of an email to reduce the volume of messages our users receive.
As an example, when an early career social worker submits a piece of work:
- they will receive a banner notification confirming the submission has been received
- their assessor will receive an email letting them know a submission is ready for assessment
Creating and personalising emails
Once we identified the required notifications, we created draft templates for each email in GOV.UK Notify. Each template’s title, URL and content is recorded on our notification spreadsheet so we can track its user need.
These templates can include personalised content such as:
- name
- date of birth
- registration number
- organisation
A placeholder is used for each piece of personalised information in the template; for example, we can add ((name)) where we want the user’s name to appear.
To make this work, the development team must tell the Notify API what information to replace each placeholder with in each template. If this isn’t done, the email will fail to send or will have missing information.
Because of this, it was essential to create a robust handover process to make sure the development team has all the information they need for each template. This includes:
- the action that will trigger the email to be sent
- the recipient
- what personalisation is included in the template
- what possible values the placeholder can be replaced with
- whether the personalisation is optional or mandatory
- whether the template contains personally identifiable information (PII)
We created a template form to record all this information. The form must be completed whenever a new template is created or an existing template is edited to make sure the integration with Notify is completed properly. The process for handing over email templates from UCD to development is recorded on our Confluence page.
What comes next?
Having investigated and tested Notify, we’ve found that creating and editing templates is a simple process and we’ve developed a clear process for integrating them with our service. Moving forward, we need to test our email templates with users to make sure they meet their needs and integrate them outside of the test space. We also need to investigate whether email notifications are feasible for our MVS as we move towards our private beta.