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.
We have teams who are using the dashboard every day, and being
confronted with this alarming yellow banner. There’s no action they need
to do since they’re only looking at the messages sent.
So this commit removes that banner from the dashboard. It also removes
the CSS and HTML for it from the app entirely because this is the last
remaining place we were using this style of banner.
If someone has no permissions but needs permissions the thing they’re
probably going to need is to send a message or edit a template.
The place they will probably come to is the place where the buttons
would be – users with these permissions are finding the thing they need
to do on this page.
So this commit adds a line to this page which (hopefully) makes it clear
they’re in the right place, but need to go and speak to someone.
* Moved the notifications code to go to admin to get the the template
preview document rather than go to template preview.
This will remove the logic from admin and place it in api so it is
easier to expand on later when there are precompiled PDFs
* Added some error handling if API returns an API error.
Caught the error and displayed an error PNG so it is obvious something
failed. Currently it displayed a thumbnail of a png over the top of the
loading page, and therefore it wasn't obvious of the state.
Things in CSS stack top to bottom like this:
- image
- `box-shadow`
- `background`
We are drawing the border around the letter using `box-shadow`. This was
working fine because the images of our letters had a transparent
background, so you could see the border through them.
At some point our letters have changed to have a white background. So
you can no longer see the border.
This commit:
- adds a new pseudo element which stacks above the image of the letter
- moves the border from the image itself to said pseudo element
Caught the error and displayed an error PNG so it is obvious something
failed. Currently it displayed a thumbnail of a png over the top of the
loading page, and therefore it wasn't obvious of the state.
We have found repeatedly in research that our users don’t know what
‘beta’ means. In this situation they come up with their own
interpretation of what it means, for example that:
- certain features are not available to them
- Notify as a whole is not available to them
- they are using a ‘different’ version of Notify to those using it for
real
In the most severe cases this ambiguity actively dissuades users from
adopting Notify. We know this from support tickets and user research;
there are probably a host of other teams we haven’t spoken to.
Here’s a quote from a user research session just last week:
> Once we’ve got the facility to receive inbound messages […] that’s not
> available to us at the moment with a beta account
From support tickets:
> We see that the service is still in beta mode – can we assume
> uninterrupted service reliability and performance?
> we do not have a .gov.uk email address any longer but I was wondering
> if we would be able to utilize the notify system which is currently in
> beta
> We are currently using the BETA version, are we able to switch to the
> TEST version so we can add other numbers to send SMS to?
> I have previously enquired about this option [receiving text messages],
> but thought it was still at Beta stage. If we can set it up so that
> notify handles the responses that would be great.
> [after going live] Should I see the wording LIVE on the login screen
> as I still see BETA.,....
> Also I note that you are a BETA service just now and that to use the
> service we would need a .gov.uk email address. We don't have this, is
> there any way that [redacted] could use the service as I note that one
> of the teams have an account?
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This commit removes the beta badge from Notify, and hopefully with it
the confusion it’s causing our users.
It was too far apart.
Can’t be fixed by reducing the margin on the table because this would
bring the table too close to other elements when the ‘only showing’
thing isn’t present.
Letters is now a mature enough feature that we should:
- be raising awareness amongst our users that it’s a thing we offer
- not have letters be a surprise to anyone creating a Notify account for
the first time
Shouldn’t be merged until:
- [ ] https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/pull/1600
It’s noticeable when clicking from row to row in the spreadsheet that
the page jumps around a fair bit on load because there are a couple of
Javascript-powered components.
This commit makes sure:
- the radio select component doesn’t change height when rendering for
the first time
- the scrollable table doesn’t show parts of the table that should be
hidden by overflow for a fraction of second before all the JS has
run
- the right-hand shadow on horizontally scrollable tables doesn’t fade
in on initial page load but shows at 100% opacity immediately
Fitt’s law[1] states that bigger click areas are quicker and easier for
people to click. Therefore we should make click areas as big as
possible, without being ambiguous about what the outcome of clicking
will be or increasing the potential for accidental clicks.
The click areas of the row numbers in the table were very small – this
commits makes them as big as the containing table cells.
Uses this technique to achieve the bigger click areas without disrupting
the layout:
http://authenticff.com/journal/css-pro-tip-expanding-clickable-area
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
We weren’t calculating the height quite right; we were trying to
compensate for something that should have been compensated for in the
`stick-at-top-when-scrolling` code.
Add the 5px to the shim there is required because we’re adding it to the
element that the shim in replacing.
There were three problems with showing tables fullscreen:
- it was over-optimised for very big spreadsheets, whereas most users
will only have a few columns in their files
- it was jarring to go from full screen and back to the normal layout
- it was a bit change for existing users, where we prefer incremental
changes that make things better without disrupting people’s work
(where possible)
So this commit changes the big table to scroll horizontally in the page,
not take up the full width of the page.
From the fullscreen table it keeps:
- the shimming method to keep the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of
the screen at all times
It introduces some more refinements to make it nicer to use:
- fixing the first column, so you always know what row you’re on
- adding shadows indicate where there is content that’s scrolled outside
the edges of the container
Two bits of context:
1. As we start dealing with letters, which have more columns, it’s more
likely that people’s spreadsheets won’t fit in our current layout.
2. We already removed the view of the template from the page that shows
row-level errors (eg bad phone number or missing personalisation) in
spreadsheets because you don’t need to know about the content of the
message in order to fix the errors.
This commit goes further by removing anything that isn’t to do with
the errors, including the normal GOV.UK header and the service’s
navigation.
This means the content can go the width of the page, which means it can
be allowed to scroll horizontally without being a usability car
crash. Which means that the layout doesn’t break with a spreadsheet that
has lots of columns.
If you’ve chosen a text message sender then it’s good to see
confirmation of your choice.
This replicates what we do when you choose an email reply-to address.
Numbers over a billion overflow the two column layout. Numbers over one
hundred thousand overflow the three column layout.
This commit makes the type size smaller in these cases, so that the
numbers still fit in the boxes.
These are the settings that our analytics person has said we should be
using across all the GaaP products.
This commit also makes sure our tracking code is identical across all
the templates that have it in (including the obsfucation of UUIDs). We
may want to remove the ID obsfucation later on, but for now let’s make
sure it’s happening consistently in all the places.
Linebreaks are an important part of the letter contact block, and make
it easier to read.
Bold text works for short pieces of info like email addresses or phone
numbers, but is too heavy for the letter contact blocks because they
tend to be longer.
Inbound text messages can run over multiple lines. This makes the page
harder to scan. Your phone, and the outbound messages page, only show
the first line of the text message, and truncate the rest with an
ellipsis.
This commit does the same for inbound text messages.
It also stops the timestamp for the inbound messages being squashed and
wrapping over multiple lines, which looks messy.
We couldn’t do this before, because it would have stopped people from
being able to copy/paste the full message content from this page.
