User need
As a project lead, I need to maintain an up-to-date list of key project contacts so that I can quickly contact the correct person when needed.
Initial design and feedback
We grouped all a project's contacts together in a summary card. This card sat in our 'about the project' summary page.
The card included these contacts:
- Project managed by
- Team lead
- Grade 6
- Project director
- School chair of governors
- Trust chair
When we presented this design to users, they:
- were not sure if the contact 'Projected managed by' was a Regions Group project lead or an Education Estates project manager
- did not find a school chair of governors contact useful
- did not always have the trust chair as a contact. It could be someone else at the trust, like a deputy chair
Whilst we could make some content changes to our contact labels, this would not fix an underlying problem: it's not clear which contacts are in Regions Group and which are in Education Estates.
Creating a new design
We looked at content designs from
- Complete conversions, transfers and changes (Complete)
- Find information about academies and trusts (FIAT)
Project leads use these systems too, so we wanted the way we show contact details to feel consistent.
New design
In our design, we split our contacts into 3 sections:
- Regions Group
- Education Estates
- External
We put each contact in its own summary card, based on Complete and FIAT's designs.
In the Regions Group section, we changed 'Project managed by' to 'Project assigned to'. This was to avoid confusion with the Education Estates project manager.
In the External section we:
- changed trust chair to trust contact, and added a 'role' field. We believe this will give project leads more flexibility
- added a phone number field to trust contact. Research on Find information about academies and trusts' design indicated that project leads want a phone number for trust contacts
- added an Ofsted contact. This is based on an assumption that project leads will find it useful to make a note of their contact at Ofsted, like they do for the trust
To avoid making our 'about the project' summary page too long, we replaced the contacts section with a contacts tab.
This is consistent with Complete, who added external contacts and internal contacts tabs to projects.
We decided to just have a Contacts tab, as we only have 2 internal contacts to show to users.
Next step
Test the new design with project leads and iterate accordingly.