If you’ve chosen a text message sender then it’s good to see
confirmation of your choice.
This replicates what we do when you choose an email reply-to address.
You’ll quite often be landing half way down this page. So the context
afforded by being able to see the phone number gives you some
reassurance that you’ve landed in the right place.
We anchor link to the relevant message in a thread. Which is good, but
it leaves the messages hard against the top edge of the viewport. This
looks sloppy. So this commit:
- makes each message focusable
- shifts the focused message with CSS to sit away from the viewport
> Once an inbound message has been received, there should be a way to
> see the other messages in the system from the same service to the same
> number. Both in and outbound. Nice inbox/whatsapp stylee view or some
> such. This way the context of the reply is understood.
>
> Initially will only see the outbound template, not the actual message,
> but we’re going to change this for the rest (soon), so that you can
> always see the full message for all outbound.
Because:
- drawing things in CSS is fun
- when we have inbound messages, having a tail pointing the other way
will help differentiate which messages are inbound
Things we don’t do with SMS messages any more:
- put paragraphs in them (we use `<br>` tags instead, to allow for
multiple linebreaks)
- pick them using radio buttons
- render the template’s name as part of the template
- render the phone number that the message will be sent from as part of
the template
- SMS message preview gets slightly wider so it lines up with a 4/8
column
- Edit email box gets wider to match more closely the width of the
previewed and delivered emails
Letter templates have (or will have) multiple different editable
regions. I think that the most intuitive way for this to work is to have
- an edit link for each of these areas
- positioned next to the thing to be edited
Again, this isn’t fully hooked up, but since no-one is using letters
live yet this is a good way of getting research feedback and pointing
towards where we want the feature to go.
Uses percentages for the positioning so that the alignment is maintained
on mobile.
Users need to pick a time in the next 24hrs, or send a file immediately.
Rationale for this is a bit lost in time-before-holiday, but generally:
‘Now’ and ‘later’ as the inital choices makes it really clear what
this feature is about conceptually.
The choice of times is absolute, eg ‘1pm’ not ‘in 3 hours’
This commit refactors the `email_message` and `sms_message` UI components to
take fewer parameters.
`name`, `edit_link` and anything to do with versions are identical for both
text and email messages so I’ve moved them to the pages where you choose a
template or see the versions.
This commit also tidies up the wording and styling of the template history
stuff.
_The code for this is quite hacky and light on tests. But I’d really like to get
it in the app for the research tomorrow to see how well the feature works._
This commit changes the tour from being a set of static screens to some help
which guides you through the process of sending your first test message.
The theory behind this is that what users are really struggling with is the
concept of a variable, rather than the relationship between the placeholders and
the column headers. And like learning to program, the best way to learn is by
taking an example and modifying it to your own needs.
This means that when someone adds their first service we set them up an
example email template and an example text message template. Then there is a
guided, three step process where _all_ the user can do is send a test message to
themselves.
Once the message is sent, the user still has the example templates which they
can edit, rather than having to remember what they’re supposed to be doing.
I don’t think that if there’s only one version of the template that it’s
useful to see the created at date.
The auditing stuff only becomes relevant once someone a template has been
changed.
When previewing a template on the send page, having the recipient appear
as a placeholder should help reinforce the relationship between the
columns in the CSV and the placeholders.
Then, when previewing a message, having the template populated with the
first recipient’s email address/phone number should reinforce that
relationship again.
For users who:
- want to send messages from a template
- want to edit templates
For developers:
- who need to get the ID of a template
This commit mainly cleans up the choose template page so there are less
options, and the options that are there are less wordy.
This means:
- moving ‘send yourself a test’ onto the send messages page, and making
it button
- stripping a lot of stuff out of the ‘send from API’ page, so it’s more
obvious what the template ID is
> At the moment, we have an all email templates page, and an edit an
> individual page.
>
> This gets messy when we refer to templates like the dashboard and the
> activity views. We solve this currently by using anchor links to the
> list page, but this is clunky.
>
> So lets add it, then update the links on the dash and activity to the
> new view page.
>
> Should be a link from the view a single template page, to the template
> hub page.
https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/117349227
Emails can get very long.
When you’re trying to do other things on the page this results in a lot
of scrolling.
This commit truncates email messages to about 3 lines, and adds a JS
toggle which reveal the full contents of the email.
If a user puts a linebreak in an SMS template then the recipient will
see these linebreaks on their phone. So when we show a preview of an SMS
template, it should have linebreaks in it.
Would like to test something like this and see how well it works.
Intention of having this page is so:
- template IDs are discoverable (https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/115404593)
- it’s obvious there’s an ‘automated’ way to send messages, as well as the CSV
way (we’ve seen people oblivious to this in research)
The email pattern looked a bit shonky when displayed in a narrower column. This
commit fixes it by making the email’s metadata (eg subject, from) into a table,
which it sort of is. This means that it is more flexible about the size of
container in which it sits.
This commit adds a new page, which appears after a user enters the name for
their new service. It shows how the service name will appear in emails and
text messages.
This means that the new service is not created until after they have confirmed
that the name is appropriate in context.
This has also involved:
- visual changes to the ‘email template’ pattern, which wasn’t very refined
before
- removing a bunch of words from the enter service name page, because most users
don’t read them, and we reckon that showing a preview is a better way of
getting them to understand what is meant by service name
Still to do:
- validating the the generated email address for a service is unique (on the
API) side
- having the API return the generated email address, rather than determining it
in the admin app
This commit adds a shortcut, which (in the background) does the creation and
uploading of a CSV file for you.
This enables users to send themselves a test message without having to fiddle
about with CSV files.
This doesn’t need to be a form—it’s not changing any data.
And having the primary action on the page as ‘Use this template’ it makes it
clear what the page is for.
A previous commit removed these to differentiate between this page and the
manage templates page. It turns out that we do want previews on this page
because:
- the users for the two pages might be different—they might only be allowed to
do one or the other depending what permissions they have
- it’s useful to see what the placeholders in the message are before uploading
a CSV, to make sure the CSV has the correct column headings
This commit re-adds the message preview with a simpler UI. Discussed with
@antimega and we both agreed that the speech bubble tails on the messages should
go.
If the templates page contains text messages and emails then there’s two ways it
could be structured:
- into two sections, all text messages first, then all emails
- emails and text messages interleaved, sorted by date
I think the second one is better. Imagine a situation where you mostly do emails
but have a few text messages. You’d have to scroll past the text messages to get
to your emails. Every time.
I reckon that the most commonly accessed templates will be the most recent ones.
Message status was almost identical to banner, visually and semantically.
This consolidates the two into one component.
This means adding an extra parameter which controls whether or not the banner
has a tick (with and without a tick are the only two variations currently).
Having the full history of the message is more information than is necessary.
We should only show what stage the message is at, and the time that it reached
that stage.
We can do research later on to find out if users understand or care about the
different stages.
This mocks out a data structure for a job’s messages, and renders this data:
- on the notification page, as a table, which links through to…
- …the page for an indidivual message
This commit adds some stubbed data for the pages. The structure of the data
is just a proposal, but it gives the templates something to work with for now.
