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.
Generally, bigger click areas are better[1], as long as they don’t cause
ambiguity.
This commit expands the clickable area of links to templates to include
hint text underneath which states the type of template.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
Normally, fixed position elements are positioned at `top: 0`.
The code that stops them from overlapping the footer does so by:
- setting the position to absolulte
- setting `top` to a calculated value (eg `1500px`) which makes it sit
above the footer
The problem is caused because we’re animating `top`, so when scrolling
back up the page elements are getting animated from `1500px` to `0px`,
ie flying up from the bottom of the screen.
The transition between something being static in the page and fixed to
the top of the viewport is a bit jarring.
This commit adds a bit of animation so that, as elements become fixed,
they appear to catch up with the scrolling of the page.
You’ll quite often be landing half way down this page. So the context
afforded by being able to see the phone number gives you some
reassurance that you’ve landed in the right place.
We anchor link to the relevant message in a thread. Which is good, but
it leaves the messages hard against the top edge of the viewport. This
looks sloppy. So this commit:
- makes each message focusable
- shifts the focused message with CSS to sit away from the viewport
> Once an inbound message has been received, there should be a way to
> see the other messages in the system from the same service to the same
> number. Both in and outbound. Nice inbox/whatsapp stylee view or some
> such. This way the context of the reply is understood.
>
> Initially will only see the outbound template, not the actual message,
> but we’re going to change this for the rest (soon), so that you can
> always see the full message for all outbound.
This commit adds two things:
a section on the dashboard to show how many inbound messages the
service has received in the last 7 days, and how recently an inbound
message has been received
---
Doesn’t show the contents of any messages, just like how the rest of the
dashboard is an aggregation, never individual messages.
a page to show all the inbound messages the service has received in
the last 7 days
---
This shows the first line of the message. Eventually this will link
through to a ‘conversation’ page, where a service can see all the
messages it’s received from a given phone number.
Because manually editing the URL isn’t a great user interface, this
commit adds a search field to do this on the user’s behalf.
For this pass at the story it doesn’t do any validation – the user will
just get no results if they search by something which isn’t a phone
number or email address.
If the user navigates to a different ‘bucket’ of notifications (eg
delivered, failed) then the search term is reset, because they’ve
changed the filter which is at a level above the search term.
Because:
- drawing things in CSS is fun
- when we have inbound messages, having a tail pointing the other way
will help differentiate which messages are inbound
Things we don’t do with SMS messages any more:
- put paragraphs in them (we use `<br>` tags instead, to allow for
multiple linebreaks)
- pick them using radio buttons
- render the template’s name as part of the template
- render the phone number that the message will be sent from as part of
the template
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.
Because the email addresses can get pretty long, and have no spaces in
them, they sometimes break out of their containing box. This looks messy
and causes horizontal scrolling.
We’ve seen in research a user getting stuck playing with the
scheduler. They picked a day, but then didn’t want to choose one of the
options for that day. There’s no way to do this except pick a day and
then un-pick it.
What they ended up doing was clicking the grey back button, which took
them back to the previous page, making them upload their file again.
This commit adds a ‘back’ link for the scheduler. ‘Back’ seems like
sensible naming because that’s the thing that the user tried to click,
and the UI of a link matches the thing they clicked to get into this
situation.
The delete link was designed to be used with a button, where it needs
some padding to separate it from the button.
We now have a case where it’s being used without an accompanying button,
so we need a variation without that padding.
Not sure what about the new radios is causing this, but they no longer
expand the size of the container, causing an overlap.
The fixed height was originally for performance reasons, but removing
it doesn’t seem to cause the page to jump around on load, so I think
it’s OK.
The visual appearance of radio and checkbox form inputs changed in
GOV.UK Elements here:
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_elements/pull/296
This was subsequently reimplemented with different markup and no
Javascript here:
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_elements/pull/406
This has meant making the following changes to our app:
- changing the markup in our radio/checkbox macros to match the example
markup given by GOV.UK Elements
- removing the previous Javascript file because it’s no longer needed to
make the radios appear visual selected
- making the buttons on the scheduled job picker look like links,
because the grey button style looked weird with the new radio buttons
- SMS message preview gets slightly wider so it lines up with a 4/8
column
- Edit email box gets wider to match more closely the width of the
previewed and delivered emails
