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
If a service doesn’t have permission to send international letters but
someone tries to upload a letter with a valid international address we
just tell them that the last line must be a UK postcode.
This is a bit opaque and:
- suggests that we’re not recognising at all that it’s not a UK letter
- doesn’t explain why it must be a UK postcode
This commit adds a new, error message which tells users why their letter
can’t be sent. And hopefully will give them a better idea of how to
resolve the problem, if they really do need to be able to send
international letters.
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.
To help people understand that broadcasting is not a precise technology,
we have shown the estimate bleed area on the map.
Because people aren’t familiar with the technology a visual only clue is
not enough. So this commit adds a key to the map, which explains what
the different outlines mean.
It also removes the sticky footer from this page to:
- make the key visible on the page
- make people scroll and review the map before they get to the big green
button
- not reduce the size of the map any further
Pill pages are:
- /notifications
- /template-usage
- /monthly
- /organisations/<organisation_id>
- /templates
Includes changes to:
- the folder-path component
- the page-header component
...all their h1s have the same id.
Change the HTML & CSS for user-list-item's to
support their content being split into 2 columns
of a grid instead of the edit link being
positioned absolutely.
Also includes:
1. removes `<div>`s from `<ul>` (non-valid HTML)
2. split action link out from permissions list
3. split summary of folder permissions out from
permissions list
4. introduces a class for blocks of text that
appear when there are no items.
5. fixes tests broken by changes to HTML
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 have a bunch of stuff for doing lat/long transformation in the
`BroadcastMessage` class. This is not a good separation of concerns, now
that we have a separate class for dealing with polygons and coordinates.
This commit does two things:
- uses our new polygon-simplifying library to process the polygons
before storing them, rather than processing them in real time
- stores only the polygons in the database, rather than the whole
GeoJSON feature, because we don’t need any of the other information
about the feature
Simplifying polygons means reducing the number of points used to render
them. This commit implements simplification such that, for any given
input polygons, the combined point count of the simplified polygons is
less than 100.
When simplifying the polygons we are trying to get the smallest number
of points while meeting these two rules:
1. No part of the area the user has chosen can be cut off
2. The area of the simplified polygon should be as small as possible
This commit introduces two techniques we weren’t using before:
1. Dilating and eroding the area to fill in concave details of the
shape, like inlets and harbours[1]
2. Making the simplification threshold proportionate to the perimeter of
all polygons, so bigger and crinklier polygons get more
simplification applied
It also shows the estimated bleed as a separate polygon. This lets us
make it bigger (so it’s more closer the the approximate bleed) without
having to send a bigger area to the CBC and compounding the amount of
actual bleed.
1. Inspired by this blog post about ‘removing the crinkley bits’ from
Vancouver Island:
http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2010/11/removing-complexities.html
Includes the following pages:
- letter contact (in service settings)
- sms-senders page (in service settings)
- email reply-to (in service settings)
- API key page
Note: the call on the letter contact page uses
the first line of the contact address as the
unique identifier for each button.
Includes implementation of new code on Reply-to
email addresses page.
The existing code put the live region on the
module element so the id and button were
read out when the state changed.
The report from the Digital Accessibility Centre
(DAC) said screenreader users were confused by the
content changing because it wasn't announced.
These changes attempt to make the state changes
clearer by:
1. moving the live region out into a separate
element so we can better control what is
announced
2. adding hidden text around to the button and text
above (sometimes the id, sometimes the 'Copied
to clipboard' text) to give more context
When the id is copied to clipboard, the button
changes but this is not announced as the
live-region text takes precedence (due to being
set to 'assertive'). Because of this, hidden text
has been added in change 2 to explain what the new
button does.
