Record a decision allows a regional delivery officer to record the decision made about an academy conversion project. This can be:
- Approved
- Approved with conditions
- Declined
- Deferred
We tested the design with delivery officers (DOs), the primary user responsible for recording decisions in the to-be process. Our participants included:
- 4 DOs who navigated through the feature themselves on our development environment
- 5 DOs who we presented the feature to
Here are our findings:
Deferred and declined tags look too similar
One DO struggled to tell the difference between the declined and deferred tags - they thought the tags were both brown.
Project template doesn’t match what goes to advisory board
Our current design risks misleading users that the project template in our system is the template that was approved, declined etc at advisory board. However, the DO will edit the template in Microsoft Word after it has generated from our system to get it ready for advisory board.
Approved with conditions
DOs would prefer this to come before who made the decision, ideally as one of the decision options.
"I would [be happy with the order], but I don't know if it might be a bit easier to have that to begin with. You know, after you've selected the approved, because I don't know if I did have any conditions I might be waiting for this point and wonder why it hasn't come up yet." ACP1
"I would be wary if I had approved with conditions, I wouldn’t know which one to click, approved or deferred. I also would like to be able to add notes, I had one recently that was deferred and I added some notes as to why." ACP7, follow-up
Next steps
- Monitor in user research whether users struggle to distinguish between deferred and declined tags
- Make it clear that the project template in our system will be different to the one approved, declined etc at advisory board
- Make it easier for DOs to record an approved with conditions decision