This prototype was created for user testing user’s tolerance for the time taken to answer these questions and how difficult it would be to answer some more complex questions.
What we changed
We added a series of procurement questions to the Request for Help form for cleaning services.
There are over 70 procurement categories so for the purpose of user testing the questions, we only created a prototype for cleaning services. It was decided by the team that testing the longest set of questions would tell us a lot about users’ tolerance for how much we could ask them and whether they were able to answer the more complicated ones in this journey as there’s currently no facility in the form that allows users to save their answers and come back to complete the form.
Why we changed this
We currently only ask users minimal questions about their procurement and then after a 2-day response time, our specialists reply with a list of questions they need in order to accurately assess what advice or help is required.
We know that users are frustrated about not being asked some of these questions upfront when they go through the RfH form.
The 2-day delay led to more follow-ups from the Procurement Operations teams handling requests before they could triage them to the right internal teams. It also meant schools wouldn’t respond to follow ups either because they’d dropped out of the process or were spending the time gathering answers before replying.
We bet that by adding some triage questions within the request form, we can make the process to capture information from schools and provide them with the right support, more efficient and accurate.
How it works
The questions were built using the GDS prototyping kit allowing users to go through the questions from beginning to end. It was intentional to give users a happy path to go through because we wanted them to see as many questions as possible.
View the triage prototype used for user testing
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Further considerations
This prototype was specifically designed for testing so all of the questions were non-mandatory. In reality, all these questions should be mandatory as per service design standards.
We should consider further testing and measuring of the questions for other categories and look at how multiple schools with multiple contracts would be able to easily answer these questions within one request journey.
We should consider further sense checking of the questions and the order in which they’re presented in this flow to make sure they work for all types of schools and procurement categories.
We should consider if the number of questions presented apply to all types of requests and how we make clear in the journey the kind of support we will be providing based on their answers.
We should consider if all these questions are needed for triaging at this stage in the request process or if some of these questions would be more applicable as part of further conversations with schools.