We have teams who are using the dashboard every day, and being
confronted with this alarming yellow banner. There’s no action they need
to do since they’re only looking at the messages sent.
So this commit removes that banner from the dashboard. It also removes
the CSS and HTML for it from the app entirely because this is the last
remaining place we were using this style of banner.
Things in CSS stack top to bottom like this:
- image
- `box-shadow`
- `background`
We are drawing the border around the letter using `box-shadow`. This was
working fine because the images of our letters had a transparent
background, so you could see the border through them.
At some point our letters have changed to have a white background. So
you can no longer see the border.
This commit:
- adds a new pseudo element which stacks above the image of the letter
- moves the border from the image itself to said pseudo element
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.
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.
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.
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.
The visual convention for redaction is heavy black crossing-out.
Our text colour isn’t always black exactly though (usually it’s very
dark grey, sometimes just dark grey). `currentColor` is a magical CSS
value that let’s us set the background colour to whatever the text
colour is. So both the text and redaction look like they are part of the
same thing.
Couple of subtle visual things here:
- opacity to make the colour better match the text colour – a filled box
naturally looks darker than thin text, so this knocks it back a bit
- an inset shadow to take a few pixels of the bottom edge – the visual
weight of text is biased upwards because text has ore capital letters
and ascenders than descenders – this make it look aligned visually
We’ve made a few changes to the tour recently, without changing the
help text on the left hand side of the screen. So the stuff you see on
the right side of the screen doesn’t quite sync up any more.
This commit adds an extra, introductory page that just shows the
template and a next button, which better matches the ‘every message
starts with a template’ help text.
Works similarly to the delete template flow, because it’s a destructive,
one-way action.
Not on the edit template page, because it’s not something you want to be
considering every time you’re editing a template. And we saw that people
couldn’t find the delete button when it was on this page.
Adds a bit more CSS for the `dangerous` banner type, because the content
here is quite complicated. Breaking it into a list helps, but the
spacing didn’t look right, so needed some tweaking.
Can ship independently of the code that shows the redaction, but needs
the API first.
