Content design: Ivy Halstead-Dawber, Justin Darley
Interaction Designer: Steve O'Connor
With the approval process in place there was data being collected and stored that could show what was happening with tasks. Along with providing useful insights to DfE this gave an opportunity to add some extra usability and insight for the service users as well.
The policy team expressed an interest in having a history of task updates, an audit trail that could be viewed and understood easily.
The first design that came to mind was the Ministry of Justice component for a timeline. This has been used in other services for similar content so it seemed like a good option to try.
Version one
The first version of the audit trail lead with the status and content changes in a task. As these were the two key changes being tracked it seemed like the obvious way to show the content.
We tested this with the policy team and, although they were positive about the timeline design in general, they found it more difficult to track what was happening with the task over time. Time was an important and easy to follow element.
Time.
We revised the audit trail content to lead with the date that changes were made instead. We also included the full initial set of data entered and showed only the changes in content updates.
This one was well received by the policy team. Success!