Designer: Dev team / Steve O'Connor Content: Tony Leavy, Matthew Pearce
The spreadsheet
The Task and Service Index (TSI) started life as a simple spreadsheet put together by the policy team. A lot of work was done by Tony and Matt in working with the relevant finance services within DfE. They teased out all of the various tasks and jobs that school business professionals need to do for each service, related dates, services, URLs, etc.
The simple spreadsheet became a complex spreadsheet.
There were two main reasons to digitise the spreadsheet.
- Make it easier for the policy team to add a new task
- Make the task data easier to access and comprehend.
There is also a need for this to eventually be rolled out to people outside the TSI policy team to use, so that services can add tasks themselves.
The build
The bulk of the initial build was created by the development team as a direct translation of the information in the spreadshseet. Steve then reviewed the UI and asked for some initial changes before launch.
At this stage we were still using the gov.uk header. We had a dashboard with minimal text content, a task index, and a services index. Both index pages included buttons to add new content. The columns shown were selected by the policy team.
Adding a task
This screen may make some people scream!
The principle of "one thing per page" is taken to it's limit here as it is one task per page. This layout is exactly what the users want though, and that's the most important consideration.
They have the information to hand, they want to enter it quickly.
But we did ensure that the details would be correct by including a check your answers page.
Task details
As there was a need to include both task and service details on the page we decided to use the summary card component. The summary cards help to understand how the data is separate.
The next thing to do is review the content and see how well this works for the policy team.