Posts

Collecting contact numbers

We needed to design how to collect local authority professionals' phone numbers and contact preferences, so voluntary and community sector organisations could get in touch about their requests.

Connect families to support

26 June 2023

Creating a variable option for costs

When users add services to 'Manage family support services', they provide details about what the service costs. User research showed that binary options for ‘it costs money’ and ‘it does not cost money' were not enough for some users.

Connect families to support

24 July 2023

Changing how users add information about when a service takes place

Users of ‘Manage family support services’ need to add information about when their services happen. However, user research showed that we needed to improve our service so they could.

Connect families to support

24 July 2023

Improving the ‘add a service’ journey

Users can add services to our directory. User research showed that the ‘add a service’ journey was confusing, and gave us ideas for improving it. This post outlines what we changed and why.

Connect families to support

25 July 2023

Softening our language for VCS professionals

Our service relies on voluntary and community sector professionals using it to support families. Without them we have no service. So, we made our language softer and kinder.

Connect families to support

28 July 2023

Designing changes to the word ‘family’

We needed to cut down on the use of the word ‘family’ across our service to be more inclusive and relevant to users.

Connect families to support

28 September 2023

Eligibility checking - round 3 design update

For our final round of User Research, we focused on a ‘Check now, apply later’ journey for parents.

Check your eligibility

13 December 2023

Updating the add a service journey

We identified some improvements that could be made to the way services were added in ‘Manage family support services’ (Manage) to make it easier for end users to find the support they need.

Connect families to support

27 March 2024

Providing key performance indicator (KPI) metrics

We wanted to find a way to display KPIs on ‘Manage family support services and accounts’ (Manage).

Connect families to support

16 April 2024

Allowing account managers to hide services

Our team identified a user need to either delete or hide existing services from the directory.

Connect families to support

5 June 2024

Allowing LA account managers to view VCS services

We identified the need for local authority (LA) account managers to have more oversight of services added by volunteer and community sector (VCS) organisations.

Connect families to support

4 July 2024

Allowing local authority account managers to delete services

Our team decided to implement a delete functionality to allow users to remove services from the directory.

Connect families to support

26 September 2024

Creating a single directory: reasons why and initial design thinking

The family digital project team has begun work on merging the two directories, 'Find' and 'Connect'. A single directory will help to improve the user experience and reduce maintenance efforts. This article explains our reasoning and initial planning.

Connect families to support

19 December 2024