What our users need
Users need to make sure that people only have one role on the governing board of a trust.
This is because trustees and employees are responsible for effective governance of the trust and members need to hold them to account. There could be a conflict of interest if these groups of people are the same.
Users said they would manually look through names of the trust leadership team, trustees and members to make sure there was no overlap.
Some users sorted the governance tables alphabetically by name to make that job easier.
We hope to save them time by doing the hard work for them.
Design options
We thought about having a summary card towards the top of the page listing the people who had more than one role on the board.
However, we already had a summary card at the top that showcased the governance turnover. Having another summary card underneath reduced the visual importance of the first one.
We would also be repeating the names and roles of people already listed further down the page.
The other option was to add a warning message underneath a name if it appeared more than once.
This meant we didn’t need to repeat names and roles. The warning messages would also appear in the order of a user’s natural reading pattern as they went down the page. It felt like a cleaner option.
Current design
We used the GDS warning component but in red instead of black to make it stand out more.
This was for a few reasons.
The black warning component:
- works for guidance pages where there are blocks of text and the warning stands out as a lone, indented piece of content
- stands out well in transactional services where it’s one question per page
Our product is content heavy and uses many different components on a page. Users missed the black warnings on the Overview page as it blended into the rest of the page.
We also had to be careful not to make any judgements for the user, instead prompting them to investigate further. This is because there could be 2 people with the same name or there could be another legitimate reason for the same name appearing more than once.
So far, users have easily spotted the warning message, understood it and found the guidance around what to do next helpful.
Next steps
We worked out 3 different scenarios which would trigger the warning message based on the rules in the Academy trust handbook.
If a CFO, Accounting Officer, Chair of trustees is also a member, then display ‘Also listed as a member. Could be a conflict of interest. Check financial statements or website.’
If CFO or member is also a trustee, then display 'Also listed as a trustee. Could be a conflict of interest. Check financial statements or website.’
If an Accounting officer is also a trustee, then display ‘Also listed as a trustee. Could be a conflict of interest. Check Articles of association.’
We will build the logic for these 3 scenarios after MVP and continue testing them.