In April 2022, the Regional Delivery Directorate (RDD) service owner decided that we should present Manage an academy conversion and Manage an academy transfer as one service. This is because the product team for each service merged into one and we wanted to avoid confusing users with two services.
Ideally this would have involved merging the two codebases together to avoid making content changes twice. However, this would be time-consuming and impact our ability to deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) by our October 2022 deadline. As such, we decided to create the impression that our two services are now one.
What we did
We created a landing page that asks users whether they want to:
- Manage an academy conversion, or
- Manage an academy transfer
When users select a radio button and click Continue, they go to the projects listing page for conversions or transfers.
We used the former service names as the radio button values to minimise disruption to our existing users’ mental models. We also kept the service names in the projects pages for consistency.
We created two versions of the landing page: one in the conversions’ codebase and the other in transfers. This was the MVP solution which had only a minor impact on the user experience: changing the domain name in the browser.
When users click the Prepare conversions and transfers or Back to project type links, they return to the What do you want to do page without switching codebase.
Next steps
Confirm:
- Whether the What do you want to do? page makes sense to users.
- How users would navigate back to What do you want to do? from other pages in our services.
- If users feel they are using one service, even though it’s two codebases linked together.