What we wanted to improve and why
Earlier in the year, FIAT underwent a peer review. UCD professionals from across the department were encouraged to give us their feedback.
We had a lot of suggestions for our search page, and we felt that some of them could potentially bring benefits to our users with relatively low effort on our part.
Broadly, they suggested that:
- an introduction may help new users or those that arrive at FIAT by mistake to orientate themselves
- describing the information FIAT contains might help people to decide if it's the correct tool for them
- it may be helpful to give users other options if FIAT isn't what they're looking for
How we went about it
To save time, the team would use a mixture of new ideas and some old designs that had previously been held back for MVP.
We agreed to:
- add an introduction to explain what FIAT does
- list the things a user can find in FIAT
- introduce links to other products and include a short explanation of what they do
Problems we encountered
Although these changes would be technically simple, getting the design right proved to be trickier than we had anticipated.
Introducing FIAT at the right time
In the beginning, we struggled to find a way to describe FIAT early enough to for a user to decide if it was the correct tool for them, without moving the search box too far down the page.
Choosing the right links
You need to be granted access to some of the services, tools and products DfE colleagues use. This means we couldn't link straight into them.
We also couldn't be sure which tools we should link to, as:
- our users had different needs, and it would be impossible to link to all of them without introducing lots of scrolling
- we felt that it would be asking too much of our users to ask all of them a list of their most used tools
Our solution
Our UCD (user centred design) team came up with some sketches, and chose two that we felt represented the best starting points for further discussion.
We then played them back to the wider team and between us we settled on one to be refined further.
Splitting the introduction
In the end, we decided that the introductory copy needed to describe two different things:
- what FIAT is
- what you can use it for
The idea behind FIAT is fairly simple, so describing it could be done in a sentence or two. This would not take up much space.
The second description needed to explain the information FIAT holds. This would need more space and have to be updated as features get added.
We decided that a bulleted list would be easiest for our users to read and for us to maintain.
Over time this could become quite long, but we realised that by placing it inside a 'details' component we could stop it from pushing the search box further down the page, and keep it hidden from users that don't need this information.
Signposting
We decided to start by linking to SharePoint pages for RSD products, because:
- they give us a starting point
- they contain a description and guidance for the things we're pointing to
- where a user needs permission to access a product, there's also a link or information on how to get it
- if somebody leaves feedback on one of these pages about their journey from FIAT, we’re more likely to see it
How the designs tested
The introductory text tested well with subject matter experts and users.
The "What you can find" link gave us mixed responses.
Some users said that they wouldn't use it, but others thought it was helpful to "see this up front", and that it may be particularly useful for new starters.
We feel that the different opinions our users have about this shows that giving them a choice was the right thing to do.
The signposting area tested well.
Although we had several comments saying that we had chosen a good selection of links, we expect to get more feedback once users have had time to work with them.
What next
This will be the first attempt at improving the search page and we expect to make further changes once we've seen how it tests.
Some things we plan to do or are considering already:
- update the 'list' section regularly
- remove the word "out" from the end of the component link - it isn't needed
- remove, add or change the signpost links based on user feedback
- possibly include an option for suggesting new signposts