To help users of Plan technology for your school understand what they need to do to meet the DfE’s digital and technology standards, we redesigned all the recommendations in the service into a set of ‘core’ recommendations.
The core recommendations are designed to help remove pain points users told us about, including:
an overwhelming number of recommendations
recommendations that are not always clearly aligned to the standards
recommendations with no clear next action for the user
knowing which recommendations and actions to prioritise
frustration when updating answers leads to different recommendations
Each core recommendation is associated with a single question and provides a measurable action, like developing an asset or reviewing that asset over a period of time outlined in the standards.
The core recommendations work with the new progress tracking and statuses feature. They represent the actions a user needs to take to meet the standards and help them understand and monitor their progress.
Read about progress tracking and core recommendations
Opportunities to improve the content for users
We knew that users reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of recommendations they were given after completing a self-assessment, so alongside the progress tracking and statuses work, we audited the recommendations to find ways to reduce the cognitive load.
Removing ‘find out’ recommendations
We began with what became known as ‘find out’ recommendations. Triggered by a user response of “I don’t know”, these recommendations simply told the user to ask the relevant person within their own organisation for help.
Since all users now see all recommendations, we were able to work any mention of asking an internal colleague into the more informative core recommendations where necessary.
Sweeping away duplication
Showing all recommendations to all users also meant we could remove a lot of duplicate and near-duplicate content from the service. For example, if a user told us they use anti-malware software, we’d recommend they continue doing so. If they told us they do not, we might return a similar recommendation telling them to start.
This often led to near-identical recommendations prefaced with “you’ve told us you are doing this” or “you’ve told us you are not doing this”. We knew users were concerned about recommendations with no clear action, as well as recommendations that appear to change when they update their answers, so we took the opportunity to clear away unnecessary and confusing repetition.
With the introduction of statuses there’s no need for slightly different versions of the same content. Instead of receiving a recommendation to continue what they’re already doing, users now see a core recommendation with the same key information and a clear status indicator of whether it’s already been done or needs attention.
Combining recommendations about the same core action
Finally, we identified and rewrote instances of content that was split across more than one recommendation but would work better as a single recommendation. These were often very short recommendations that covered part of an overall action dealt with elsewhere.
Putting it all together
Taking all the actions together, in many instances we were able to merge several recommendations into a single, actionable recommendation.
For example, in ‘Cyber security – Technical security’ we previously asked the question ‘Do you review your anti-malware software every term’?
This question was associated with 4 recommendations:
Review your anti-malware software once a term.
Continue to review your anti-malware once a term.
Check anti-malware software records.
Check for potential cyber security incidents or attacks.
The first and second could be merged because the new statuses make ‘continue to’ recommendations unnecessary. The others could also be merged, since they were short and relevant to the action. In this case, the 4 recommendations became ‘Review your anti-malware every term’.
Across the whole service, we were able to reduce the overall number of recommendations from 429 to 117 without removing any useful information. That’s a reduction of more than 70 percent, which means far fewer recommendations for the user to engage with, less content to digest and a clearer route to prioritising what to work on first. In addition, it means a much more streamlined service for us to manage.