Co-design:
We want to design with, not for our users and want them to have a more proactive role rather than just acting upon their feedback. Co-design sessions also have the added benefit of speaking to more people in a short space of time, giving us the ability to learn quicker and iterate faster.
The first round of co-design sessions were to understand how data should be sorted. These were small, and involved group and 1–2-1 sessions. In order to make the sessions as accessible as possible we had 1 facilitator per participant and will allow participants to contribute in a number of different ways that they feel most comfortable.
Task 1 - Categorising data into groups that make sense to the users - So that we can understand how users would like to navigate through data categories when completing their tasks and what they might call those categories.
Each participant had all the data headings available on TRAMS, we worked with them to group them into categories.
This workshop enabled us to categories the data on TRAMS into groups that would make sense to our users. We also wanted to investigate whether these categories would make it easier for users to find what they were looking for.
For example, in the co-design sessions participants said they would expect to see financial related information under one heading such as Financial.
The categories on the existing TRAMS were:
- Summary
- Cases and Concerns
- Academies in Trust
- Financial Data
- Financial Risks
- Financial Docs
- Educational Performance
- Governance
- Data Updates
- Sponsor Information
- Map
(Many of these not visible depending on screen size)
Our participants created the following categories of information:
About the trust
- Trust details
- Trust overview
- Academies in this trust (7)
- Governance
Risk and interventions
- Cases and concerns
Education Performance
- Primary
- Secondary
Financial
- Financial data
- Financial documents
We then used these to inform our initial prototype. Our first prototype used tabs displaying the categories as navigation, which you could then click through to see further pages.
Our initial tests revealed users struggled to click through to find the information they needed, they wanted to see what they were looking for.
We created a left hand navigation, still using the categories as headings and breaking the content up into groups. We found this pattern from other government services used on Ministry of Justice, within DfE and the Gambling Commission.
We found that users preferred a left hand navigation, but welcomed the use of categorising content into groups making it easier to find what they were looking for. It received a positive response from our user testing:
“That tab on the left hand side with very very clear headings, I think it was really easy to find that information.” Delivery Officer, Regions Group
“in the past it just felt like lots of things were kind of hidden in TRAMS, like in the corner’ Delivery Officer, Regions Group
We are now looking at how to implement the left hand navigation and have found multiple different methods across services for things like - when a user might zoom in to 200%+. The navigation is also included in our accessibility audit.