What our users need
Our users need to assess how a trust is performing so that they can decide if:
- any support is needed
- the trust would be a good fit for a school
They need to see high level information for each academy within the trust to easily spot trends and opportunities to support them.
A pain point on TRAMS (Trust and academies management service) right from the beginning was the frustration of needing to scroll a lot to find information.
Users said that they had to remember information while scrolling around pages and tables. It was difficult to compare figures.
We looked at many ways to meet these needs.
How the design evolved
We tried using a list view to display information about academies in the same trust. This meant that users wouldn’t need to scroll left and right. We followed similar patterns to get information about schools for presenting a list of academies.
But users said that they preferred the current TRAMS layout of it being in a table as it allowed them to quickly make comparisons.
We tried giving our users the ability to add and remove columns of information in a table format.
However, users preferred a view of all the information rather than adding or removing columns.
Users said they could make the comparisons they needed with the new table format.
They preferred this to the other views that we had presented to them.
There were still a few things that were bothering them.
Some users thought the ‘Trust information’ card at the top of the page could be misread as the sum total of the information in the academies table.
Some users didn’t realise they needed to scroll down to see the academies table and missed it altogether.
We also discovered that more information about each academy was needed like URN and free school meals.
However, we could not fit any more columns into the table.
Current design
We moved the ‘Trust information’ card to the ‘Overview’ page and gave it a more meaningful title - ‘Trust summary’.
We also used sub navigation to group the information in the academies table so that it all fit on the page without needing to scroll left or right.
Next steps
We will continue to monitor feedback.
Once we start to design the individual academy pages, we’ll revisit this page to see if it needs to be updated.