This is based on some work Gwen did for Civil Service Digital. Let’s
get it in for now so that we have a starting point from which to
improve.
This specifically doesn’t reference ‘optional’ placeholders because I
don’t know how best to explain those yet.
Two problems with having it on the side:
- some users didn’t see it at all
- there wasn’t space to have additional guidance about Markdown-style
formatting
There are some common questions that keep coming up when users are
editing or creating templates. This commit adds a pattern for sections
of guidance which can be shown/hidden.
It then modifies the guidance as follows.
Change:
- guidance about placeholders; give an example about what to do and what
not to do (because the mistake we keep seeing people make is putting
the thing itself, not the name of the thing)
Add (pretty basic at the moment but a need for these has come out of
research):
- guidance about links
- guidance about message length for text messages
_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.
If the hint aligns with the message body then it looks like you can only
add placeholders to the body. This commit aligns it with the subject
instead, and since it overlaps both it looks like you can add
placeholders to both (hopefully).
This commit makes the placeholder hint not be dependent on their only
being one textbox with placeholders on a page.
To do this it needs to be its own module, because the two textboxes are
each self-contained instances of the same module.
The way I’ve gone about this is to make the placeholder hint accept a
list of textboxes it should look in when deciding what message to
display to the user.
Most of the code is extracted from the existing placeholder highlighting
module.
In order for subject lines to have their fields highlighted they have to
be textboxes. This is because the highlighting script only works with
textboxes that don’t scroll, either horizontally, vertically, or be
keying through them.
We’ve seen lots of users unsure what the ‘template name’ field is for,
especially on first use. Is it the subject line of the text message?
Will it be who the message comes from? Answer: neither.
So this commit adds a hint to make that clearer.
This commit makes the ‘how to do placeholders’ box part of the tour,
with the same blue background.
It also adds some Javascript enhancement so that:
- it responds to the contents of the message template
- has a ‘show me’ link which inserts ‘Dear ((name))’ into the template
contents textbox
We’ve found that this has helped people understnad what placeholders
are, and how to do them.
The same `.html` file is shared between adding a template and editing a
template.
The page heading needs to be contextual to the URL, either ‘add’ or ‘edit’.
Somewhere along the way this got lost; this commit reinstates it.
In research we’ve seen users struggle with this. Often they’d type
((Joe Bloggs)) or ((XX/XX/XXXX)) instead of a sensible name.
Lets see if explaining it differently helps.
Templates now have:
- a type (email or sms)
- a subject (if they are email templates)
We don’t want two completely separate view files for email and SMS, because they
would have an enormous amount of repetition.
So this commit adds
- different templates for SMS and email templates
- different form objects for SMS and email templates
…and wires them up.
