Content designer: Ivy Halstead-Dawber Interaction designer: Domm Norris
Overview
The Taxonomy manager is a feature that allows users to create, edit and archive taxonomies and tags, which are associated with tasks and subtasks within Manage your DfE Connect data. This feature provides a structure to the information within Manage your DfE Connect data and will allow the service to grow as a data source.
We set out to create a scalable tool that would allow administrators to expand the existing taxonomy structure. This meant we needed to give users the ability to:
- Add new parent and child taxonomies
- Edit and archive existing parent and child taxonomies
- Add new tags
- Edit and archive existing tags
The design work also took into consideration the version one of taxonomies and tags specifically in relation to Funding Aims and Funding Types.
Homepage
We needed to create a central repository for all the information about taxonomies and tags within Manage Your DfE Connect data.
From a design perspective, the most important aspect of the Taxonomies landing page was ensuring that valuable information was presented to users in a way that allows them to easily identify the taxonomies they wish to view or edit.
We opted to use a standard table, within multiple columns, to give a high-level view of the different taxonomies.
One complexity was understanding how we can help users understand whether a taxonomy is a ‘parent’, a ‘child’ or a ‘grandchild’. We decided that simplifying the terminology to ‘parent’ and ‘child’, removing reference to ‘grandchild’, would reduce the complexity of the information. Given the fact we needed to create a design capable of scaling to many different taxonomies, we decided to introduce filters and pagination.
Filters will allow users to easily reduce the number of items in the table view to what is relevant to them, while pagination will help to reduce cognitive load by presenting a less overwhelming number of items.
Details page
Every taxonomy and tag, regardless of whether they are a parent or child, has a details page. Based on feedback we had received during our discovery interviews; it was important for there to be pages that provide key information about a taxonomy or tag.
The existing design work from tasks and subtasks provided an existing template for showing key information, which formed the foundation of our design work.
The existing design work also provided patterns for actions such as editing and archiving something.
Adding and editing taxonomies
We have a series of input driven forms within the Taxonomy manager. These allow users to add new taxonomies and tags, as well as updating information that has already been submitted.
The forms use standard GOV.UK patterns and components, including radio buttons, checkboxes and text inputs.
Based on feedback we had received from users for previous features, we knew that there was less concern about having multiple form inputs on a page. This meant that we followed ‘one thing per page’, in the sense of grouping and presenting related inputs together on a stepped journey.
Reordering lists
Our research insights showed that it would be helpful if users could manually arrange the order of tags when they are presented. For example, if a user inputted a list of tags for school types, it could be done in an order that does not contextually make sense. For example, a list of school types could appear as:
- Secondary
- Primary
- 16-19
- Nursery
In this context, making the list automatically default to alphabetical would also not make sense. Therefore, we created a design based on the summary list component, which allows users to manually select whether they want to move a list item up or down the list of tags.
Navigation
To allow users to easily navigate to the Taxonomy manager, we decided to add a new item to Manage your DfE Connect Data’s main navigation bar. This would give the feature sufficient prominence within the service to reduce friction and allow it to be accessed at any point.