We adjust the spacing under the textbox when doing the send one off
flow. This was based on the assumption that there would always be a
sticky header in the send one off flow.
This assumption is no longer true, so this commit implements the same
spacing in an independent way.
The idea behind the sticky textbox on this page is so you can scroll
through a long email or letter to find where in the message the
placeholder appears, while still being able to see the textbox you
should be typing in.
With text messages, they’re hardly ever long enough for anything to be
off the screen – ie no scrolling is required.
However if the user does scroll, they can end up covering the message
content with the sticky top panel. Which then looks like the message
has disappeared, so they click ‘back’ in the browser, then click into
the message again to make the page reload.
This commit removes the stickyness when sending from a text message
template.
This will stop us repeatedly forgetting to add `novalidate` and
`autocomplete='off'` to our forms (which is how most of them are set
up).
It uses sensible defaults, based on how we most-commonly configure
forms:
- most of our forms are `post`ed (but this can be overridden)
- `autocomplete` should only be enabled where it makes sense, otherwise
it’s more annoying than useful (but this can be overriden)
- we should never be using HTML5 form validation because our own error
styles and messages are better
‘Upload recipients’ and ‘Send to one recipient’ have always been
slightly clunky phrases.
Now that basic view jumps straight into the ‘Send to one recipient’
flow there’s no way for users to get to the ‘Upload recipients’ flow.
By adding a link to it from the ‘Send to one recipient’ flow it’s
possible for users of basic view to access it.
But we don’t want to introduce too much inconsistency between basic view
and admin view because users will be migrating from one to another. They
might also be talking to their manager, who wouldn’t be able to tell
them where to click if they were looking at two completely different
interfaces.
This also means that we can keep the left-hand navigation in basic view
nice and simple with the two options (‘Templates’ and ‘Sent messages’),
rather than trying to introduce something like ‘Send one message’ and
‘Send lots of messages’ later on.
This commit:
- uses WTForms email fields wherever we collect email addresses
- makes sure we don’t let the default HTML5 form validation get trigged
(using `novalidate`[1])
We don’t want to use the default validation because:
- it looks out of place
- it’s not well supported by assistive technology
1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/form#attr-novalidate
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.
Not good to be storing people’s phone numbers in browser autocomplete.
And increases the chance of accidentally sending the wrong thing to the
wrong person.
It’s a confusing proposition to have two features which are almost
identical. Even differentiating between them in the template menu would
be tricky.
I think the better thing to do is rename the whole feature to ‘send
one-off message’.
Then if someone wants to use there own phone number or email address,
give them a quick shortcut to doing that, once they’re in the flow.
In the background this reuses the ‘send yourself a test’ code, but
the user is never aware that they’re going through a different route
to send an individual message. So the proposition stays nice and clean.
We have some fairly complicated nested if statements in our Jinja that
decide what the page titles should be. It’s only going to get more
complicated with the send individual message routes.
So this commit:
- moves the logic from Jinja to Python
- adds tests to check things are working as expected
- sets the page titles to the right thing for each flow
People are going to hammer through this form _fast_, so not making them
click into the form field on every page load is a nice enhancement.
Reuses the code written to do this on the page where you enter your
verification code.
You might need to scroll this page quite a lot to see where a
placeholder appears in your template – especially if you have a long
email or letter.
One of the things I’m trying to stop happening so much is a lot of
scrolling back and forth. This would happen if you were scrolling down
to see the placeholder, then back up to fill in its value.
So this commit makes the textbox ‘sticky’, ie it always stays at the top
of the viewport, even when you scroll down. This lets you see the
placeholder and the textbox side by side, no matter how long the
template is.
The code to do this mostly comes from the GOV.UK Frontend Toolkit
(documented here: d9489a9870/docs/javascript.md (stick-at-top-when-scrolling)).
I had to add some extra CSS to make it look good when it overlaps the
content of the page, which the GOV.UK Frontend Toolkit implementation
doesn’t really anticipate.
The send yourself a test feature is useful for two things:
- constructing an email/text message/letter without uploading a CSV file
- seeing what the thing your going to send will look like (either by
getting it in your inbox or downloading the PDF)
- learning the concept of placeholders, ie understanding they’re thing
that gets populated with _stuff_
The problem we’re seeing is that the current UI breaks when a template
has a lot of placeholders. This is especially apparent with letter
templates, which have a minimum of 7 placeholders by virtue of the
address.
The idea behind having the form fields side-by-side was to help people
understand the relationship between their spreadsheet columns and the
placeholders. But this means that the page was doing a lot of work,
trying to teach:
- replacement of placeholders
- link between placeholders and spreadsheet columns
The latter is better explained by the example spreadsheet shown on the
upload page. So it can safely be removed from the send yourself a test
page – in other words the fields don’t need to be shown side by side.
Showing them one-at-a-time works well because:
- it’s really obvious, even on first use, what the page is asking you to
do
- as your step through each placeholder, you see the message build up
with the data you’ve entered – you’re learning how replacement of
placeholders works by repetition
This also means adding a matching endpoint for viewing each step of
making the test letter as a PDF/PNG because we can’t reuse the view of
the template without any placeholders filled any more.
‘Print a test letter’ seems to be closer to what people’s expectations
of what this feature does are.
The word ‘generate’ sounded too much like something the system was
doing, rather than something you, the user, were doing.
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.
In pages specific to a service (e.g. dashboard and sub pages) the title
needs to distinguish which service it applies to. This is mainly to give
context to screen reader users who could be managing multiple services.
Implementing this uses template inheritance:
`page_title` includes `per_page_title` includes `service_page_title`
‘GOV.UK Notify’ is inserted into every page title.
Pages that set `service_page_title` get the service name inserted too.
Posit that examples of where you can put different parts of the address
is more helpful than ‘example, example, example’. Also shows that you
don’t have to fill all of the address columns.
Spot the Easter egg 🎅
Implements https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-utils/pull/81
Handles addresses as multiple columns:
- in ‘Send yourself a test’
- in example CSV files
- in validating that a CSV file has recipients (eg at least an ‘address
line 1’ and ‘postcode’ column)
- when showing the contents of a CSV file
As few UI changes as possible, once we have the thing working end-to-end
we can think about how the UI might need to work differently.
Let users create/edit/delete letter templates.
Let them upload a CSV file or send a test against a letter template.
Big assumption at the moment is that addresses only have one line, and
therefore one column in the CSV file.
Our templates are a littered with `request.args.get('help', '0')`.
This commit refactors these into a single helper method, which can be
used by the view functions, then passed to the template.
This makes the templates cleaner, and should make it easier to refactor
`help` out of the query parameters entirely in the future.
We’ve seen people land on this page and expect the message to be on
their phone already.
‘Check and confirm’ sounds a lot like ‘check your phone’, which is
language that we use earlier on when we _have_ sent a message.
Hopefully ‘preview’ is a better indication that it’s not sent yet.
This changes it back to how it was when we first introduced this
feature:
https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-admin/pull/181
It’s kind of lost on the page where you upload a file, which is a shame
because it’s a good teaching aid.
While the blue should help reinforce the relationship between the placeholders
and the column headings, it makes the column headings very busy visually, and
less like column headings. Which make the relationship harder to see. I think.
_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.
This commit does two main things:
- adds textboxes to the send yourself a test page, so you can replace
((name)) with ‘Chris’, or whatever your name is
- rejigs the send page a bit to make it clearer what the CSV upload is
for and how to use it
The idea being that, since most users go into ‘send yourself a test’
first, it teaches them about how placeholders work by making them do the
replacing themselves.
