DfE’s 9 regions consist of a list of authorities. Each authority has a team lead who is responsible for assigning applications to become an academy to delivery officers (DO).
Given team leads assign projects to DOs in the as-is process, it made sense to introduce a project assignment feature in our service.
Understanding the problem
We collated our user research findings about assigning projects on a Lucidspark board. We then thought of possible solutions and problems with assigning projects in our service.
Design provocations
We compared our notes with other project assignment designs in DfE. We also reflected on the as-is process for assigning projects to DOs.
Our interaction designer used these points of reference to create 2 design provocations:
Choose from a pre-populated list of DOs. This was based on the designs of other DfE services, including our sister service Complete conversions, transfers and changes.
Enter the email address of the assigned DO. A text field option if we couldn't pull users' names from a user management system. We believe it's easier to identify someone using their unique email address than it is their first name and surname.
We discussed the 2 options as a team and considered the pros and cons of each one.
This prompted a follow-on discussion about how we would maintain a list of users. We considered different approaches and the implications of each approach.
After a technical spike from both teams, we agreed on approach one: choose from a pre-populated list of DOs.
Instead of presenting a list of all DfE users, we decided to use DfE Active Directory to provide a list of users with access to our service. We believed this would include all the DOs currently using our service, as well as some irrelevant users (data experts in the Regional Services Division for example).
Prototype design
We created a prototype design considering everything that we discussed as a team. We included the autocomplete component used by the Complete team to create a consistent user experience.
We used the select component as the non-JavaScript solution and applied the autocomplete user interface as a progressive enhancement. This is recommended on the README in the autocomplete component.
Both team leads and DOs will be able to assign projects using this feature. Whilst we believe that team leads are the primary users of this feature, there's no evidence to suggest that DOs being able to assign projects is a risk.
Next steps
We'll test our prototype with team leads and DOs in user research sessions.