One of the big things we found in user research was that people were
uncertain what the effect of giving someone basic view was.
So in the spirit of ‘show don’t tell’, this commit adds a way for users
to preview basic view. They can go into the preview and click around as
much as they like, just as if they really had the basic view assigned to
them.
Once they have seen enough they can return to the settings page where
they can decide whether or not to switch basic view on for real.
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.
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 heading structure of most pages is incorrect (`<h2>` followed by
`<h1>`). The `<h1>` indicates the main purpose of the page, the service
name (currently the first `<h2>`) doesn't need to be a heading.
It’s been unclear that:
- the dashboard exists
- that you click the name of the service to get back to it
So this commit:
- takes the link off the service name
- adds a link labelled ‘Dashboard’ to the navigation
We have lots of keylines in our pages, eg tables, email message previews
This makes the pages look quite cluttered, especially because the
keylines don’t always align.
I think it looks much cleaner without the keylines in the nav, and we
have few enough nav items that we don’t need to chunk them up.
- remove black border from banner
- make banners have internal columns
- make nav 2/3rd width, 19px text and more spaced out
- only show the ‘restricted mode’ banner where it’s needed
- rename ‘restricted mode’ to ‘trial mode’
This commit moves user-related navigation into the proposition header (the black
bar) at the top of the site. It adds some custom SASS to override GOV.UK
template and align these navigation items to the right (because it looks
better).
It then removes the service chooser dropdown (and its associated SASS and JS) in
favour of a link alongside the user-related navigation items. ‘Switch service’
is the best language for this that we’ve come up with so far.
This means that the only way of adding a new service is from the `/services`
page. So this commit removes the redirect if you land on this page with only one
service (else it would prevent you from ever being able to add more).
