Not necessary to have it on its own page – it’s one line of stuff. And
definitely not as frequent use as the ‘Upload recipients’ or ‘Send
yourself a test’ links.
Since we’ve simplified the left hand nav so much it doesn’t need 1/3 of
the width of the page. By making it smaller we have more space to show
previews of email and letter templates.
Letter templates have (or will have) multiple different editable
regions. I think that the most intuitive way for this to work is to have
- an edit link for each of these areas
- positioned next to the thing to be edited
Again, this isn’t fully hooked up, but since no-one is using letters
live yet this is a good way of getting research feedback and pointing
towards where we want the feature to go.
Uses percentages for the positioning so that the alignment is maintained
on mobile.
We think that sending a test for letters will mean downloading or being
emailed a PDF version of the populated template. While we haven’t
changed the app to do this yet, renaming the button is a good way to get
feedback about it from research.
The links to the right of the template take up valuable horizontal
space. This means that the preview of email and letter templates isn’t
as big as it could be. By making the letter preview bigger it removes
the need to click through to the PDF to see a preview.
Reuses the navigation style used on the API integration page, because I
think it damages consistency to create another new button style.
The find as you type only becomes useful once you have too many
templates to quickly scan visually on the page. I reckon that 7 is the
number where this starts becoming tricky. About 5 fit on the page
without scrolling (on my Macbook).
Not everyone knows how to use `ctrl` + `f`, and it’s not scoped to
just the list of templates.
The template you want to work with is often not the first one in the
list, but ordering by created at is useful for other reasons (mainly
around first time use).
This commit adds a find as you type control which aims to give users a
quick way of getting to the template they want to work with.
When a team has lots of templates the choose template page gets very
long. It gets hard to find the template that you are looking for.
Our initial reckon was that teams would not be giving their templates
very useful names, and therefore a preview would be helpful. What we
have found is that:
- teams actually do give their templates useful names, and refer to
these template names elsewhere
- the previews are less useful for emails and text messages, because
they have so much content (which for emails also makes it harder to
`ctrl` + `f` the template name)
The other problem we found was that this page presented the user with
a _lot_ of options. For each template there were 4 actions, plus the
click-to-preview action for letters, plus the ‘see previous version’
action for templates that had been edited multiple times. It was a very
busy page.
And the final problem (that we recently introduced) was that there was
no way, other than the visual cues, to know whether a template was a
letter, email, or text message.
So this commit strips back the choose template page to be very focused
on finding the right template, by only showing the template name and
type. The user can then click through to a page that shows just a single
template, and perform actions relevant to that template from that page.
This was used on the old product page to do the graphic of three phones
showing three different messages. We don’t have this any more, so this
‘component’ is unused.
Also removes some unused imports which were a hangover from previous
versions of the product page.
- ‘messages sent per month’ is a better description of what will appear
on the page than ‘activity breakdown’
- ‘templates used by month’ instead of ‘this year’ for consistency
I think ‘usage breakdown’ still works for the remaining link – it’s more
than a monthly breakdown, it also breaks down the spend.
Doesn’t need to say ‘by month’ in the `<h1>`s themselves, because you
can see from looking at the page that it’s broken down by month.
When we moved the ‘Switch service’ link out of the nav on non-service
pages it removed any obvious way of getting back to your service on a
page that doesn’t have the service navigation (the non-obvious way is to
click ‘GOV.UK Notify’ in the black bar).
So this commit adds a ‘Back to service’ link which does the same thing
as clicking ‘GOV.UK Notify’ (tries to send you to your last-used
service, sends you to the list of services if it can’t).
We keep seeing Chrome:
- autofilling the sign in form with a phone number in the email box
- autofilling the register form with an email address in the phone
number box
This is because Chrome tries to autofill what it considers to be a
_login_. It detects a login as being:
- a password field
- preceded by a text input field
On the sign in page the password field is preceded by a field which is
supposed to receive an email address. On the register page the password
field is preceded by a field that’s supposed to receive a phone number.
I suspect that this is why it’s missing the two up.
The solution to this seems to be to defeat Chrome trying to be clever,
and make it autocomplete based on the `name` of the fields instead (we
name them sensibly, e.g. `email_address`, `phone_number`). The way to
defeat it seems to be sticking a dummy `input` right before the password
field on the register page. This dummy input is hidden from the page and
from screenreaders, so a user should never know it’s there. but Chrome
will autofill it anyway, with whatever wrong value it wants to.
The breaking change page temporarily holds the changes in hidden inputs
on the page. The messages content it gets from the `.content` property
on the subject. This is raw and not transformed in any way, so fine.
For the subject it gets the value from the `.subject` attribute on the
template. For email templates, this will be transformed to highlight
placeholders with `<span class='placeholder'>…`. This means that when
the change is confirmed, it’s this encoded version that gets sent to the
API. Which is bad, because we then save `<span class='placeholder'>` in
the database.
This commit changes the page to look at the `._subject` attribute
instead, which is the internal, untransformed version of the subject.
For some reason we were rebuilding `new_template` as a dictionary,
without the `placeholders` attribute. This meant that we were never
actually counting the placeholders, just counting the length of `None`
and adding 1 to it.
So this commit fixes that, beefs up the tests, and makes sure that
everything is pluralised properly.
no actual template functionality yet - just the ability for services
that have letters enabled to edit a 10 line block that will go on the
top right hand side of their letters with contact information
We’ve had a couple of instances where teams have sent the wrong template
to a …number of users.
Sometimes templates can be very similar and only have slight variations
to tailor them to a specific subset of users. So identifying the right
template by sight can be difficult.
We know that teams do give their templates meaningful names, and use
these names in other tools (spreadsheets etc) to refer to the templates.
So putting the name of the template on the page where you’re about to
send all the messages seems like it’s gives people an easier way of
double checking that they’re doing the right thing.
I umm’d and ahh’d over the wording a bit, and think ‘Preview of…’ reads
the best. It looks a bit weird because most template names are Title
Case. I think it’s better than some ambiguous punctuation (eg ‘Preview:
Template name’ or ‘Template name – preview’).
Some examples of real template names:
- Preview of Example text message templates
- Preview of Online LPA payment application reminder
- Preview of Create user account
- Preview of Split journey - Unknown credentials
- Preview of Public user: application without supporting documents
- Preview of Renewal Survey – February
- Preview of CEX New adult
- Preview of Applications are closing tomorrow
- Preview of Your application result - if successful
Right now we have separate pages for email and text message templates.
In the future we will also have a separate page for letter templates.
This commit changes Notify to only have one page for all templates.
What is the problem?
---
The left-hand navigation is getting quite crowded, at 8 items for a
service that can send letters. Research suggests that the number of
objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2 [1]. So
we’re at the limit of how many items the navigation should have.
In the future we will need to search/sort/filter templates by attributes
other than type, for example:
- show me the ‘confirmation’ templates
- show me the most recently used templates
- show me all templates containing the placeholder `((ref_no))`
These are hypothetical for now, but these needs (or others) may become
real in the future. At this point pre-filtering the list of templates
by type would restrict what searches a user could do. So by making this
change now we’re in a better position to iterate the design in the
future.
What’s the change?
---
This commit replaces the ‘Email templates’, ‘Text message templates’ and
‘Letter templates’ pages with one page called ‘Templates’.
This new templates page shows all the templates for the service, sorted
by most recently created first (as before).
To add a new template there is a new page with a form asking you what
kind of template you want to create. This is necessary because in the
past we knew what kind of template you wanted to create based on the
kind you were looking at.
What’s the impact of this change on new users?
---
This change alters the onboarding process slightly. We still want to
take people through the empty templates page from the call-to-action on
the dashboard because it helps them understand that to send a message
using Notify you need a template. But because we don’t have separate
pages for emails/text messages we will have to send users through the
extra step of choosing what kind of template to create. This is a bit
clunkier on first use but:
- it still gets the point across
- it takes them through the actual flow they will be using to create new
templates in the future (ie they’re learning how to use Notify, not
just being taken through a special onboarding route)
I’m not too worried about this change in terms of the experience for new
users. Furthermore, by making it now we get to validate whether it’s
causing any problems in the lab research booked for next week.
What’s the impact of this change on current services?
---
Looking at the top 15 services by number of templates[2], most are using
either text messages or emails. So this change would not have a
significant impact on these services because the page will not get any
longer. In other words we wouldn’t be making it worse for them.
Those services who do use both are not using as many templates. The
worst-case scenario is SSCS, who have 16 templates, evenly split between
email and text messages. So they would go from having 8 templates per
page to 16, which is still less than half the number that HMPO or
Digital Marketplace are managing.
References
---
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
2. Template usage by service
Service name | Template count | Template types
---------------------------------------|----------------|---------------
Her Majesty's Passport Office | 40 | sms
Digital Marketplace | 40 | email
GovWifi-Staging | 19 | sms
GovWifi | 18 | sms
Digital Apprenticeship Service | 16 | email
SSCS | 16 | both
Crown Commercial Service MI Collection | 15 | email
Help with Prison Visits | 12 | both
Digital Future | 12 | email
Export Licensing Service | 11 | email
Civil Money Claims | 9 | both
DVLA Drivers Medical Service | 9 | sms
GOV.UK Notify | 8 | both
Manage your benefit overpayments | 8 | both
Tax Renewals | 8 | both
There’s a good reason for having the ` ` – it stops GOV.UK Notify
being split across two lines (which could happen on a smaller viewport,
eg mobile). Gotta protect the brand.
Not good for the brand for it to be showing up in the page though 😬
This got broken as part of 3f41090a94
The label for a form should never have user-submitted content in it, so
using `safe` is fine.
> When the CSV is missing the header row, we get an error and the user
> will see "Sorry, we are experiencing technical difficulties..."
>
> We should return a better error message for the user.
– https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/140668615
This was caused by an attempt to access the `first_recipient` variable
before it was assigned. It would only be assigned when there was at
least one row in the file.
Fixing this means doing two things:
- defaulting `first_recipient` to be `None` before looking in the file
- adding an error message for when we can’t extract any rows out of the
file (which is more nuanced than the file just being completely empty)
(There’s a nasty `sort` in the Jinja template because when there are no
rows in the file the order of the required column headers is not
deterministic.)
