What we changed
We added a multi-school selector question to the Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) user journey, within the Request for help (RfH) support form. We added this screen to capture the number of schools benefiting when requesting DfE procurement support
Why we changed this
MATs range in size from 2 to more than 40 schools. The procurement requirements from these schools may be complex. We have to find a balance between capturing enough information up front to help the Proc Ops team to accurately assess what advice or help is required, and negatively impacting schools in their user journey by having to answer too many questions.
How it works
We built a prototype of the multi-school selector using the GDS prototyping kit, and user tested it with School Business Professionals. We used data from the Academies MAT membership database, and purposely chose a MAT with a large number of schools for users to test its usability, and to tell us their opinion of the page.
Findings and observations:
The page tested well – all users understood what the page was for, what they needed to do and how to do it. Users didn’t expect this task to take them a long time in their specific circumstances.
Most schools liked/ found helpful:
- where there are multiple schools in multiple regions
- user found schools easily because they were in alphabetical order
Some schools wanted:
- to search by phase of education
- 2 users thought a typeahead would be useful
Some users didn’t realise this would be a list of their schools (because this is out of context testing)
Users didn’t notice the ‘select all’ option but nobody mentioned a need for it - when prompted they preferred to select than deselect (however we only tested with MATs procuring for up to 5 schools in their trust)
One larger MAT questioned “how do schools see the regionalisation of their MAT”
At the moment we filter by Local Authority (LA) but some schools may procure by county.
Future considerations
Design decision: Do we go with County or LA to filter? (fewer filters for counties where there is a big MAT).
Consider making select all more prominent and test in live (metric on select all box to see use)
Consider having both options for region filter ( LA / County) and test in live
Add iterated screen to the live RfH form
Screenshots
Multi School Selector prototype used for user testing
