We have found repeatedly in research that our users don’t know what
‘beta’ means. In this situation they come up with their own
interpretation of what it means, for example that:
- certain features are not available to them
- Notify as a whole is not available to them
- they are using a ‘different’ version of Notify to those using it for
real
In the most severe cases this ambiguity actively dissuades users from
adopting Notify. We know this from support tickets and user research;
there are probably a host of other teams we haven’t spoken to.
Here’s a quote from a user research session just last week:
> Once we’ve got the facility to receive inbound messages […] that’s not
> available to us at the moment with a beta account
From support tickets:
> We see that the service is still in beta mode – can we assume
> uninterrupted service reliability and performance?
> we do not have a .gov.uk email address any longer but I was wondering
> if we would be able to utilize the notify system which is currently in
> beta
> We are currently using the BETA version, are we able to switch to the
> TEST version so we can add other numbers to send SMS to?
> I have previously enquired about this option [receiving text messages],
> but thought it was still at Beta stage. If we can set it up so that
> notify handles the responses that would be great.
> [after going live] Should I see the wording LIVE on the login screen
> as I still see BETA.,....
> Also I note that you are a BETA service just now and that to use the
> service we would need a .gov.uk email address. We don't have this, is
> there any way that [redacted] could use the service as I note that one
> of the teams have an account?
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This commit removes the beta badge from Notify, and hopefully with it
the confusion it’s causing our users.
It was too far apart.
Can’t be fixed by reducing the margin on the table because this would
bring the table too close to other elements when the ‘only showing’
thing isn’t present.
Letters is now a mature enough feature that we should:
- be raising awareness amongst our users that it’s a thing we offer
- not have letters be a surprise to anyone creating a Notify account for
the first time
Shouldn’t be merged until:
- [ ] https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/pull/1600
It’s noticeable when clicking from row to row in the spreadsheet that
the page jumps around a fair bit on load because there are a couple of
Javascript-powered components.
This commit makes sure:
- the radio select component doesn’t change height when rendering for
the first time
- the scrollable table doesn’t show parts of the table that should be
hidden by overflow for a fraction of second before all the JS has
run
- the right-hand shadow on horizontally scrollable tables doesn’t fade
in on initial page load but shows at 100% opacity immediately
Fitt’s law[1] states that bigger click areas are quicker and easier for
people to click. Therefore we should make click areas as big as
possible, without being ambiguous about what the outcome of clicking
will be or increasing the potential for accidental clicks.
The click areas of the row numbers in the table were very small – this
commits makes them as big as the containing table cells.
Uses this technique to achieve the bigger click areas without disrupting
the layout:
http://authenticff.com/journal/css-pro-tip-expanding-clickable-area
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
We weren’t calculating the height quite right; we were trying to
compensate for something that should have been compensated for in the
`stick-at-top-when-scrolling` code.
Add the 5px to the shim there is required because we’re adding it to the
element that the shim in replacing.
There were three problems with showing tables fullscreen:
- it was over-optimised for very big spreadsheets, whereas most users
will only have a few columns in their files
- it was jarring to go from full screen and back to the normal layout
- it was a bit change for existing users, where we prefer incremental
changes that make things better without disrupting people’s work
(where possible)
So this commit changes the big table to scroll horizontally in the page,
not take up the full width of the page.
From the fullscreen table it keeps:
- the shimming method to keep the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of
the screen at all times
It introduces some more refinements to make it nicer to use:
- fixing the first column, so you always know what row you’re on
- adding shadows indicate where there is content that’s scrolled outside
the edges of the container
Two bits of context:
1. As we start dealing with letters, which have more columns, it’s more
likely that people’s spreadsheets won’t fit in our current layout.
2. We already removed the view of the template from the page that shows
row-level errors (eg bad phone number or missing personalisation) in
spreadsheets because you don’t need to know about the content of the
message in order to fix the errors.
This commit goes further by removing anything that isn’t to do with
the errors, including the normal GOV.UK header and the service’s
navigation.
This means the content can go the width of the page, which means it can
be allowed to scroll horizontally without being a usability car
crash. Which means that the layout doesn’t break with a spreadsheet that
has lots of columns.
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.
Numbers over a billion overflow the two column layout. Numbers over one
hundred thousand overflow the three column layout.
This commit makes the type size smaller in these cases, so that the
numbers still fit in the boxes.
Linebreaks are an important part of the letter contact block, and make
it easier to read.
Bold text works for short pieces of info like email addresses or phone
numbers, but is too heavy for the letter contact blocks because they
tend to be longer.
Inbound text messages can run over multiple lines. This makes the page
harder to scan. Your phone, and the outbound messages page, only show
the first line of the text message, and truncate the rest with an
ellipsis.
This commit does the same for inbound text messages.
It also stops the timestamp for the inbound messages being squashed and
wrapping over multiple lines, which looks messy.
We couldn’t do this before, because it would have stopped people from
being able to copy/paste the full message content from this page.
In user research, we’ve seen users copy/pasting the contents of the
inbound SMS page into a spreadsheet, in order to keep a record of the
messages they receive. They even went as far as to write a macro which
fixed the errors caused by copying and pasting.
It would be much easier if we just gave them the data already in a
spreadsheet format. Which is what this commit does.
One caveat is that, because spreadsheets can contain executable code (ie
formulas), and because we’re populating the spreadsheet with
user-submitted data (albeit via SMS) we need to be careful about
injection attacks.
The details of how these attacks work are detailed here (interesting
reading): http://georgemauer.net/2017/10/07/csv-injection.html
The mitigation is to not allow characters which initialise a formula
at the start of the cell.
GOV.UK Template hanged the colour of text in focused links in
79466a489c
It was done with greater specificity than before. This means that the
way we were previously overriding the focus colour (for links with a
dark background) no longer works.
This commit makes our override more specific, so that it works again.
Entering, or reading back sequences of digits is easier when they’re a
bit more spaced out.
This is because we read words as shapes, but read numbers
digit-by-digit.
So this commit adjusts the tracking of the type to put a bit more space
in for textboxes that are going to accept digits.
Most user will only have one reply to address. Which means they should
never have to worry about IDs. And if you only have one then you never
need its ID, because the last remaining address will always be the
default.
So IDs should only be shown when a service has created more than one
reply to address.
This required a bit of visual tweaking of the _user list_ pattern,
because its spacing wasn’t defined in a way that worked when only the
name of the thing, and not its details were shown on the page.
Something in a new version of GOV.UK Elements, Template, or Frontend
Toolkit has introduced a rules which removes padding for the last
column in a table.
This is undesirable in the case of email message previews.
Think this broke when we split the setting page up into three sections.
This forces the text to wrap onto multiple lines even if it doesn’t
contain spaces (for example an email address).
We’ve moved from three to four permissions. Four permissions don’t fit
in the exiting horizontal layout.
This commit makes the permissions stack vertically instead.
This approach has some downsides:
- makes the permissions less easy to scan vertically
- makes them take up a lot more space (and at lives services, most of
them have somewhere around 15 team members)
But I think for now it’s better than any horizontal alternative that I
tried.
There are quite a few more options that there used to be in the settings
page. This means it’s hard to find the thing you want to change.
Grouping options is a common way of making things easier to find.
Grouping by channel (text, email, letter) is something we do elsewhere
that seems to work pretty well.
There is padding on the switch service link so that:
- it lines up with the service name
- it has a bigger hit area (because Fitt’s law[1])
This means that visually, the default focus state overlaps the blue
bar under the GOV.UK banner. So it needs a bit of custom CSS to make it
look right visually.
The green bordered banner feels too much like ‘success’ or
‘confirmation’. Doesn’t feel like it’s something which just gives you
the status of a thing, or here’s a thing you should be aware of.
We use panels with a blue banner to indicate something that’s clickable.
So we should move away from this style for things that are just
notifications. We can’t use teal like other bits of GOV.UK because it
doesn’t pass colour contrast.
Pay are using a box with a green border, similar to the error validation
box (which has a red border). So let’s do the same for now.
