When the list of areas is restricted to half the width of the page it
starts to look pretty higgledy-piggledy when you have lots of areas or
areas with very long names.
To do this I’ve ripped out the table markup in favour of headings,
paragraphs and lists. Probably pros and cons for each, but it was really
hard to do the layout with the content in a table.
For emails and text messages we sort by the time the user (or API) sent
them.
This makes sense for broadcasts too, since most users will receive the
alert within seconds of it being broadcast.
For alerts that haven’t started yet we can sort by `updated_at`, which
is when the user preparing the broadcast submitted it for approval.
Now that pending alerts aren’t in their own section there’s nothing to
label them as pending. So this commit replaces the extra metadata we
show for a pending alert (the name of the person who created it, which
was only ever a reckon) with an explicit label that says it’s waiting
for approval.
Splitting the dashboard into multiple sections was confusing, and people
sometimes mistook the headings as labels, especially when a section was
empty. It just wasn’t clear what the hierarchy of the page was.
This commit combines the current and pending broadcasts into one list
on the dashboard. Previous broadcasts have already moved to their own
page.
If you refresh the page on a current broadcast while someone has
cancelled it you’ll see the wrong navigation item selected. This commit
adds redirects to take you to the correct endpoint in these edge cases.
Once a broadcast has been submitted for approval it either lives on the
‘Current alerts’ or ‘Previous alerts’ page, depending on where it is
in its lifecycle.
Therefore when clicking into a broadcast from one of those pages the
same navigation item should remain selected.
Because we select the navigation items based on the request endpoint,
this means we need an endpoint for each navigation page, even if the
content of the pages will be the same in both cases.
This commit adds the two new end points, removes the old, single
endpoint and updates links to point to the new endpoint.
The most important part of the broadcast is what content was sent where
(and when).
This commit reduces the priority of the ‘meta’ information, like who
prepared and approved the broadcast. I also think that the ‘end’ time is
a lot less important than the start time, since most people will receive
the alert at or near to the start time.
Our style for areas is pale blue background with black keylines or bold
black text.
This commit makes the display of area names on the dashboard consistent
with that visual style.
This also means that we’re not truncating the list of areas, which is
appropriate because no one area is more important than any of the
others.
The dashboard for normal services is quite general, because it tells
you a bit about channels, templates and spend.
What is now the dashboard for broadcast services is much more specific,
therefore less like a dashboard. We can reflect this by giving it a more
specific name. This should reduce the amount of navigation surfing
people need to do in order to find the thing they’re looking for.
Previous alerts are much less important than ones that are live or
waiting for approval.
Therefore we can make the dashboard more focused by moving previous
alerts to their own page.
This prefixes everything to do with areas/the map with `area-list`, so
from looking at one element you know which `.scss` file will contain the
relevant code.
I emailed the Geography team at the ONS:
> Hi geography team,
>
> I work on GOV.UK Notify, which is a service run by Government Digital Service (part of the Cabinet Office). I was given your email address by [redacted] who’s been helping answer some of my questions on the cross-government Slack.
>
> We’re using some of the boundary datasets from the Open Geography Portal, and mostly they’ve been excellent.
>
> In the abstract, the problem we’re trying to solve is, given a point outside an area, what is the minimum distance to a point within that area. So, for example, if a crow was somewhere in Cardiff, what’s the shortest distance it would have to fly to reach somewhere in the Bristol local authority district?
>
> We’ve noticed some problems with the data that means our calculations would be wrong. We’ve noticed this around Torquay, Norwich and Bristol. Here are some screenshots of Bristol, from the generalised and full resolution boundaries:
>
> The artefacts I’ve highlighted are closer to Cardiff than any actual part of the land area of Bristol. They are either:
> - in the sea
> - land that’s part of North Somerset
>
> I suspect that this is being caused by the process of clipping the actual region of Bristol (which, unusually, extends into the water) to the mean high water line.
>
> I’ve worked around this by filtering out any polygons that are smaller than ~7,500m². It’s a bit hacky because parts of the Scilly Isles start disappearing. That’s not a problem for what I’m working on, but it would be nice to not need the hack.
>
> So my questions would be:
>
> - Is there a better way to remove these artefacts than filtering by area?
> - Is there a plan to remove these artefacts from the data in future releases?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Chris
They emailed back to say:
> Hi Chris
>
> Thank you for your enquiry.
>
> We have completed the amendments to the LAD MAY 2020 BFC and BGC boundaries as mentioned so you should be able to download them from the portal now.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Kind regards
> [redacted]
This commit brings in the files they’ve updated. We still have to do
some filtering (but now at a higher resolution) because they haven’t
fixed Norwich yet. I’ll email them separately about that.
We’ve had some feedback from user research that difference between
‘will get alert’ and ‘likely to get alert’ is not clear, and it’s hard
to tell if the latter is inclusive of the former. This leads people to
question the validity of these numbers, which is important, because an
the estimate should give you some idea of the impact of what you’re
about to do.
This commit reformats the number as a range, for example 1,000 to 2,000
phones.
If the range is small, eg 40,000,000 to 40,800,000 then this suggests
a false level of accuracy. So instead we just give one number and say
it’s an estimate, eg ‘40,000,000 phones estimated’
We want it to be very clear whether you’re in live or training mode
because:
- you may be switching back and forth between them
- doing something in live mode when you think you’re in training mode
would have… consequences
By adding a label next to the service name you’ll will have some
indication, on every page, which mode you are in.
Style of the label is based on the ‘Tag’ component from the Design
System:
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/tag/#showing-multiple-statuses
If you’re adding another area to your broadcast it’s likely to be close
to one of the areas you’ve already added.
But we make you start by choosing a library, then you have to find the
local authority again from the long list. This is clunky, and it
interrupts the task the user is trying to complete.
We thought about redirecting you somewhere deep into the hierarchy,
perhaps by sending you to either:
- the parent of the last area you’d chosen
- the common ancestor of all the areas you’d chosen
This approach would however mean you’d need a way to navigate back up
the hierarchy if we’d dropped you in the wrong place. And we don’t have
a pattern for that at the moment.
So instead this commit adds some ‘shortcuts’ to the chose library page,
giving you a choice of all the parents of the areas you’ve currently
selected. In most cases this will be one (unitary authority) or two
(county and district) choices, but it will scale to adding areas from
multiple different authorities.
It does mean an extra click compared to the redirect approach, but this
is still fewer, easier clicks compared to now.
This meant a couple of under-the-hood changes:
- making `BroadcastArea`s hashable so it’s possible to do
`set([BroadcastArea(…), BroadcastArea(…), BroadcastArea(…)])`
- making `BroadcastArea`s aware of which library they live in, so we can
link to the correct _Choose area_ page
previously the back link went to choosing a library.
Now, if you view a district from a county, go back to the county page.
Otherwise, go back to the top level of the library.
For a training broadcast the user doesn’t get that immediate feedback
that something has happened, like they would with a real alert, or even
sending themselves a text message.
This commit adds another tour-style page which will interrupt their
journey and hopefully reinforce the message we’ve given them earlier in
the tour.
We’re adding this because we’ve found in research that users don’t have
a good grasp of the consequences and severity of emergency alerts,
versus regular text messages.
We need to give people a better feel for the consequences of
broadcasting an alert. We’ve seen in research that some users will
assume it is subscription based, or opt-in, rather than going to every
phone in the area.
I reckon that the most effective way to communicate this is to put some
numbers next to the areas, to give people an idea of how many people
will get alerted.
We can estimate how many phones are in an area by:
- taking the population of all electoral wards in that area
- multiplying it by the percentage of people who own an internet
connected phone[1]
The Office for National Statistics publish both these datasets.
The number of people who own an intenet connected phone varies a lot by
age. Since the population data for each ward is broken down by age we
can factor this in. Simplified, the calculation looks like this:
- take the _Abbey_ ward of _Barking and Dagenham_
- in this ward there are 26 people aged 80
- 40% of people over 65 have an internet-connected phone
- therefore 10 of these 80-year-olds would be likely to receive a
broadcast
- (repeat for all other ages)
These numbers won’t be exact, but should be enough to give people a feel
for the severity of what they’re about to do. We can see if they acheive
this aim in user research.
1. This is a proxy for the number of people who are likely to have a 4G
capable phone, because only 4G capable phones will be receiving
broadcasts to begin with
What was previously ward -> local authority is now a ward -> local
authority -> county. County only covers rural counties and not
metropolitan boroughs and other unitary authorities. Previously, there
was a page full of local authorities (unitary authorities and
districts), and each one of those would have a list of electoral wards.
However, now there are counties that contain a list of districts - so
this needs a new page - a checkbox for "select the county" and then a
list of links to district pages.
If you want to select multiple districts, you'll need to go into each
one of those sub-sections in turn and click select all.
Needed to tweak the query to retrieve the list of areas in a list for a
library. Previously, it just returned anything at top level (ie: didn't
have a parent). However, rural districts now have parents (the rural
counties themselves). So the query now returns "everything that isn't a
leaf node", or in more specific terms, everything that has at least
other row referring to it as a parent. So no electoral wards, since
they dont have any children, but yes to districts and counties.
Since the key relies on visual association between the shapes on the
maps and the styling of the key, it won’t work for non-visual users.
An alternative way of giving them the same information is by providing
the size of the area numerically.
When creating broadcast message, or updating it.
We want to send simple polygons to API so we can
later relay them to the broadcast provider.
Test that update broadcast message sends polygons correctly
This commit refines which information we show on each page.
Specifically we’re
- adding some wording (‘at exactly the same time’) to try to communicate
the immediacy
- giving the ‘loud noises’ message it’s own screen to really draw
attention to it
- moving the ‘no phone numbers bit’ later in the journey, and
experimenting with explaining why that is, to make it clearer how it’s
different to a text message
Because the ‘All of’ choice appears above the search field, it shouldn’t
be filtered by the search field.
We can fix this by wrapping the sub-areas in a `<div>` and make the
selector more specific.
We’ve shown the broadcast tour to a few users now. We’ve learned what
concepts about broadcasting are and aren’t getting through.
So what we’re emphasising here is:
- the thing that appears on the phone (the ‘emergency alert’) not the
technology (a ‘broadcast’)
- how it’s different to other channels of messaging, eg text
We’ve generally spent a lot more time on the content and illustrations
this time around, so overall it’s should be clearer and shorter.
This also expands the communication of training mode into the header,
so it’s visible on every page (we can add another one for ‘live’
services later on).
We want to let users learn the system by trying it out. At the moment
they can’t explore it fully by themselves because they’re blocked at
the point of approving the broadcast, unless they involve in another
member of their team. Having to involve another person is friction that
will discourage people from exploring.
So this adds a button that lets people approve their own broadcasts in
trial mode, with some rough-and-ready content that explains training
mode and how it would be different to trial mode.
Messages awaiting approval don’t have an end time – it’s set
automatically once the message is approved.
We need to revisit the content on this page, but this is just a fix so
that the page doesn’t `500`.
Since we added the end time picker:
- we have discovered that broadcasts can’t be longer than 24h
- we have observed that most users confuse picking the end time for
scheduling the message, or don’t understand exactly what it means for
the broadcast to ‘end’
- we’ve developed the concept of ‘training mode’, which you should be
going through before sending a real broadcast
We also think that, for most scenarios, you won’t necessarily know when
a broadcast should end at the time of starting it because the cause of
the danger is not within your control. So giving you control of the
end time before the broadcast has even been approved is a confusing
distraction.
Having to pick a time at all also makes the whole process feel more
planned and less immediate. Whereas in reality all the phones in the
area will be getting the message in seconds. It’s only people coming
into the area later to whom the ‘ongoing’ aspect of the broadcast
applies.
The best place to explain what’s happening with the phones is at the
approval stage and once you’ve sent your first (training mode)
broadcast. It’s easier to explain what’s happened if it’s in direct
response to something you’ve just done.
Later on we should add some kind of email reminder after 12 hours to
make sure you still want the broadcast live, again after 18 hours, etc.
We could let you schedule an end time once the broadcast is live, but
don’t think there’s a strong need. Knowing enough that you want to
cancel is one thing, but knowing enough to want to cancel but wanting to
wait a bit… nah.
It’s been superceded by the ‘Local’ library (formerly ‘Electoral wards
in the United Kingdom’).
The latter is better because:
- it’s covers all 4 nations, not just England and Wales
- it has electoral wards as well as local authorities which group them,
so there’s more flexibility when choosing an area to broadcast to
