Why we did this work
The Provider Verification Process is the method by which staff members at Further Education (FE) Providers can receive and review the eligibility of individuals applying for Targeted Retention Incentive payments.
Currently, FE providers rely on custom email inboxes, which contain links to the verification form and spreadsheets, to manually track the verification process of each FETRI claim. The manual process can result in duplication of effort or losing track of which claims have been submitted, what stage they were at, and whether any action was still required.
A dashboard can provide providers with a clear view of all the claims they're handling. It could help them see progress at a glance, reduce the risk of human error, and make it easier to share the workload when things get busy or someone's away. Eventually, it could replace the need for manual trackers altogether.
What we did
Previous team members had some early thoughts about a potential dashboard and produced some low-fidelity mock-ups. To move quickly with user research, we used this earlier thinking to build a similar user journey in the prototype kit.
Entry into the dashboard would be via DfE Sign In. Once logged in to the dashboard, the user can click through to the provider verification (PV) form of the relevant applicant using a button that indicates the claim could be assigned to a colleague for verification.
We added a 'Check Your Answers' screen to the journey. There would also be a way to see verified claims in their own list.
We also made some modifications to the existing PV form, rephrasing a couple of questions and adding subheadings to in order to group related questions.
We used this basic journey as stimuli in the first round of user research to ascertain the appetite and how users would react to a dashboard and the updated provider verification form.
What worked
The 'All claims' screen was well received. People liked the traffic light (RAG) status indicators and wanted to see claim counts per status to help with prioritising work and reporting to leadership.
The status labels — Not started, In progress, and Completed — made sense to most people. A few were unsure about 'In Progress,' but this became clearer after stepping through the journey in the prototype.
The separate screen for completed claims was well received, accepted, and understood to help with reporting and make it easier to answer follow-up questions from claimants or DfE.
The inclusion of the Check your answers step was welcomed as currently there is no mechanism to double check the form when the submit button is clicked.
Users also saw value in the 'read-only' view for verified claims as they wanted to see the answers they had previously submitted for each claim.
What didn't work
The 'Assign claim' feature caused confusion — especially for those working alone, so another approach will need to be taken on that.
The reception to some changes we made to the PV form was mixed, which was likely due to changes in wording that broke familiar patterns, leading to a few mistakes.
Next steps
- Make claim statuses more specific and add counters for each stage
- Use consistent language across the dashboard (e.g. always use 'Verified' for a completed claim)
- Separate completed claims from those needing action, with easy navigation between them
- Explore sorting claims by submission date and adding a 'Date verified' field
- Look at ways to show when DfE has processed a claim
- Explore saving part-completed forms to support flexible workflows