Background to mandatory tasks in Get school business information
In alpha, two of the early user needs we identified were:
- I need to know what tasks I legally have to do so that I can ensure my school is compliant
- I want to be told what I need to do, how to do it and when by so that I can get re-assurance I have got things in hand, can plan for the future and can double check I haven't forgotten to do something
To respond to these needs, we designed the page below, which listed all mandatory tasks for the academic year in a single list.
We carried out user research in February and we could see that users were confused that the mandatory task that appeared at the top of the page was a date in January (that is, a date in the past). Users also told us that the first thing they expected to see on the page was the next mandatory task that they had to do.
However, users also told us that they also wanted to see mandatory tasks that had passed, so that they could check they had done everything that they needed to do.
The redesign of mandatory tasks
As as results of the research findings, we identified a new user need:
- I want to see what I have to do right now, what is coming up in the future and deadlines that have recently passed
We ideated around a number of ideas, including splitting upcoming and past mandatory tasks onto separate pages. We rejected the idea of using tabs for accessibility reasons, as these can hide content and be missed by users. In the new approach, we have kept the mandatory tasks on a single page, but have split the mandatory tasks into two tables. The upcoming dates appear in a table at the top of the page, with the next date appearing first. The past dates appear in a separate table at the bottom of the page, with dates in reverse order.
We removed the specific mention of the academic year because it's likely that there will be a point in the year when there are dates on this page from multiple academic years and our assumption is that our users do not need to be told which dates belong to which academic year.
(Note that we removed the 'Add dates to calendar' button in this version of the design; although this idea tested well with users in alpha, this is a feature that has been moved to later in the roadmap.)
We have also created a design for if there are no more mandatory tasks in the calendar:
Initial testing of the new design has shown that users can see what is coming up and can see which dates have passed. We will continue to monitor the reaction to this design in future research. We will also continue to monitor whether users miss the information about the academic year. Our subsequent round of research seems to suggest that users are happy with the wording of the two tables but we are having design conversations about defining which period of time the 'Past mandatory tasks' list covers and we are planning to make this 12 calendar months.
Next steps
An ongoing challenge we have in our design work is that for the first release, we are focusing on 'finance' as a content area and so need to create a design that will work for a limited amount of content. However, the design needs to be able to grow in future as we pull more content areas into the service.
We feel that the design we have used for the mandatory tasks page will allow us to expand the design when needed, by:
- splitting the mandatory tasks into separate pages
- adding pagination
- adding filtering
Prototype showing card designs taken forward (Please contact the School Account team for the password)