Notify could be simpler for users who only send messages

[quis]

Context

When work stated on the private beta of GOV.UK Notify (December 2015)

Sending one-off messages was out of scope:

You could only send messages by integrating with the API or uploading a spreadsheet full of email addresses or phone numbers:

‘Send yourself a test’ (February 2016)

We soon discovered that being able to send yourself a message helped people learn how Notify worked and double check their content before sending messages to lots of people. So we introduced:

• the ‘send yourself a test‘ feature in Add flow for sending yourself a text message notifications-admin#181
• a way of filling the placeholders in a template when sending yourself a test: Introduce replacement of placeholders to send yourself a test notifications-admin#541

The interface is still orientated around a spreadsheet-based workflow. Notice:

• the horizontally-arranged input fields
• how ‘Add recipients’ (by uploading a .csv file) is still the primary action

The core concept that ‘send yourself a test’ helped people learn was how placeholders in a template get replaced with the recipient’s personal information. Understanding the relationship between the template and the spreadsheet came later.

Over the following months ‘send yourself a test‘ evolved away from mimicking a spreadsheet. Some of these changes included:

• hiding the table of submitted data in the ‘send yourself a test‘ flow: Hide the recipient table on send yourself a test notifications-admin#1268
• showing one text box at a time, rather than showing them all horizontally: Show one field at a time on send yourself a test notifications-admin#1277

‘Send to one recipient’ (June 2017)

Eventually we realised there was a need for sending real messages one-at-a-time. We even saw some teams achieving this by uploading single-row spreadsheets.

We decided that the most elegant way to meet this need was to make ‘send yourself a test‘ more generic, rather than making a separate ‘send one-off‘ feature. Which is what happened in alphagov/notifications-admin#1293

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May 2018

This feature proved popular, and we saw whole new kinds of service team sign up. These teams tended to be bigger in terms of the number of staff in each team who were using Notify.

By May 2018 team members with just the ‘send messages‘ permission were the second most common amongst teams with live Notify services:

What we learned

We hadn’t anticipated having so many of these teams. We were interested in how they were using Notify, and what was/wasn’t working. So we visited lots of them, both in central government departments and local councils.

We found:

• there parts of Notify that their staff didn’t look at, the dashboard in particular
• they were producing manuals telling their staff which links to click:

What we did

1^st prototype

We had some vague hypotheses that Notify would be faster and easier to learn if we

• reduced the number of steps it takes to send a message
• changed the layout so stuff stayed in a consistent position from screen to screen
• removed the dashboard (to mimic how these teams were already using Notify)

This version tested well with actual caseworkers, but team leaders raised concerns about it looking too different to the rest of Notify, which might mean re-training for staff.

2^nd prototype

This is like normal Notify, but with:

• fewer options in the left-hand navigation
• one fewer step to send a message

This worked better – team leaders saw the value in hiding things their staff didn’t need to see.

Add ‘caseworking’ service permission

We decided we were ready to work in non-prototype code now.

A service permission is a bit like a feature flag. It gives us a way of developing new features while hiding them from existing users.

alphagov/notifications-api#1901

Let users invite people as or change people to be ‘caseworkers’

The next design challenge was working out how users would be assigned this new interface.

We made some paper prototypes as a discussion point for research with team leaders:

And something they could click:

Detail in alphagov/notifications-admin#2113

Let ‘caseworkers’ send one off messages and see sent messages

This re-created the second prototype in production code. It looked very similar:

More detail in alphagov/notifications-admin#2114

Rename ‘caseworker’ to ‘basic view’

Naming things is hard:

More detail in alphagov/notifications-admin#2146

Add a service setting to switch basic view on and off

We didn’t think that basic view would be suitable for all services so we planned to make it an opt-in feature:

More detail in alphagov/notifications-admin#2148

Add a preview of basic view

It was hard for people to know what basic view had and didn’t have, so we let people preview it:

More detail in alphagov/notifications-admin#2151

Improve labelling of navigation in basic view

This made the language in the basic view navigation consistent with existing areas of the Notify interface.

Before	After

alphagov/notifications-admin#2164

Move ‘upload recipients’ link

This was a way of giving users with basic view a route into the ‘upload recipients’ flow. Previously they couldn’t see the page that linked to it.

Detail in alphagov/notifications-admin#2175

This change had the side-effect of simplifying the page that users without basic view see:

Before	After

We also changed basic view to show previously-uploaded files in alphagov/notifications-admin#2192

Revise how we talk about what basic view is

We were still having a hard time explaining it:

1	2

3	4

More detail in alphagov/notifications-admin#2166

Launch basic view

This was ready to go in alphagov/notifications-admin#2161 but we had a better idea…

Make sending messages quicker for everyone without it being a separate view

Because we’d moved the upload link, users without the ‘edit templates’ permission could skip a page. These are the steps they went through before:

Choose page	Template page	Send page

And after:

Choose page	Template page	Send page

So everyone got fewer steps to send a message, not just users with ‘basic view’.

More detail in alphagov/notifications-admin#2207

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The only remaining difference between ‘basic view’ and ‘admin view’ was whether a team member saw the dashboard. Which is a way simpler proposition to get across in an interface:

Before	After

Launch

We rolled out this change to everyone using Notify. This one extra checkbox is probably the only difference that a team leader would notice. The whole concept of ‘basic view’ vs ‘admin view’ has gone.

Before	After

And we used Notify to email teams that we thought might be affected by – or would benefit from – these changes:

Sent to teams who do a lot of file uploading	Sent to teams that send lots of one-off messages