Our research and prototyping around ‘basic view’ found that:
- a lot of users who send messages rarely or never look at the dashboard
(yet it’s the first page they see when they sign in)
- team managers like the idea of taking away things that users don’t
need in order to make the interface simpler
We’ve disentangled the simpler way of sending messages from being part
of ‘basic view’. This means we can give managers the option of taking
away the dashboard as an independent choice, not something that’s
wrapped up in a separate ‘view’.
I think that this checkbox is a more straightforward proposition than
‘basic view’ ever was (despite all the work we did to explain it and
develop the nested checkbox pattern). In research users would often
explain the feature back to us as being about hiding the dashboard – we
should try to make Notify operate in terms of concepts that come
naturally to people wherever possible.
There are some teams who send jobs on a daily/weekly basis. They have
team members who only use Notify for this purpose. So they would
probably benefit from basic view, because they don’t need to see the
dashboard.
This commit:
- adds a new item (uploaded files) to the basic view navigation for
teams that have sent at least one job
- makes the job pages visible to basic view users
I think we should do this now, rather than as a later enhancement to
basic view. We only have one chance to announce the feature, so teams
who do send jobs may otherwise discount it as not useful for them and
the opportunity to have them use it is lost.
From Karl:
> Templates – this should be consistent with Admin view. Users may
> switch from Basic to Admin view (or vice versa), they will also
> interact with users who have a different view or permissions to them.
> Neither should have to learn new interfaces and language if possible.
> ‘Send a message’ was a nice, active label – but Notify options aren’t
> usually actions. If we’re going to change this we should be consistent
> across both Admin and Basic views.
> For the same reason, I have rejected ‘see’, ‘search’ and ‘view sent
> messages’. It will be interesting to see in user testing whether users
> read ‘sent messages’ as ‘send messages’.
The other task that caseworkers have to do (much less often than sending
messages) is look at the messages which they’ve sent. The reason for
doing this is usually to find a specific message which someone has
complained about.
This commit adds:
- a page where they can do that
- a navigation item so they can get to that page
We reckon that because this is about finding specific messages, not
reporting that it’s fine to mush all the channels (email, text, letter)
into one table.
The main task that we think ‘caseworker’ users do is send one off
messages.
So this commit:
- makes sure users who don’t have the `view_activity` permission (ie
not ‘admin’ users) can still send messages
- adds navigation so that these users have a place to go from which to
start the process of sending a one off message
It is standard practice when using GOV.UK template to highlight the
selected navigation item in the propositional navigation (black bar) by
colouring it blue.
This commit adds a new subclass of `Navigation` with the mapping needed
to decide which pages belong to which item in the navigation (or none
at all).
Because we have multiple navigations, which will share the same methods
(by subclassing) but different mappings of navigation items to endpoints
by overriding the `.mapping` and `.exclude` attributes.
In research I’ve sometimes seen people click the wrong nav item. I
reckon that people’s concept of which pages live behind which navigation
items isn’t very strong.
We can reinforce this relationship by showing, for every page, which is
the corresponding nav item. The conventional way of doing this is either
with some kind of emphasis, typically colour or bold. I’ve gone for bold
because colour would be weird.
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The implementation of this is quite loosely coupled to our application
code because:
- our application code is not well structured (eg we don’t make any use
of blueprints)
- spreading this change across lots of files in our application would
make it harder to test without actually hitting each endpoints; such
tests would be slow and verbose
So I’ve gone for more of a meta approach. Rather than testing that each
endpoint has a specific navigation item selected, I’ve gone for
validating that:
- all endpoints being mapped to are real
- all endpoints have _a_ selected navigation item (or are specifically
excluded)
This means that it’s impossible to add, change or remove an endpoint
without also updating which navigation item should be selected. And the
actual mapping is so declarative that it testing it would be redundant.
