Only services that have inbound SMS turned on should be able to see the
dashboard and ‘Received messages’ page.
There’s probably a cleaner way (decorator) of doing this permissions
stuff, but I think it can wait until we ship this.
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.
Tests assumed that the API returns the template `id` as part of the
object. It doesn’t – it returns it as the key used to look up the
object. The `id` was missing from the transformation into the format
used by the front end.
For some reason Flask is fine building the URL with `template_id=None`,
but obviously this doesn’t generate a valid link.
Although we integration test the pages that depend on these, it’s
probably a good idea to unit test them as well, to make sure, for
example, that all the different statuses are counted when working out
how many messages have been sent from a template.
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
Currently it’s not possible for a screen reader user to know which
financial year they’re looking at. From the accessibility report:
> The financial year links are contained in a navigation region -
> tabbing or arrowing through only reads out the links, not the main
> information of "2016 to 2017 financial year" - that information is
> vital for understanding the page content.
This problem also applies to other pages which use the `pill` component,
which is effectively tabbed navigation (that reloads the page rather
than showing or hiding content on the page).
There are specific ARIA attributes that can be used to mark up a
navigation as being tabbed. This commit:
- adds those attributes
- makes the selected ‘tab’ visible to screenreaders and keyboard
focusable
- adds a visual focus indicator to the selected tab
- adds `id`s to the parts of the page that are controlled by the tabs so
that they are labelled as such
This also means changing the pill component from being a `<nav>` to a
`<ul>` because `tablist` is not a valid `role` for a `nav`.
Mostly follows the example here:
http://accessibility.athena-ict.com/aria/examples/tabpanel2.shtml
The heading structure of most pages is incorrect (`<h2>` followed by
`<h1>`). The `<h1>` indicates the main purpose of the page, the service
name (currently the first `<h2>`) doesn't need to be a heading.
The previous, weekly activity breakdown was what we reckoned might be
useful. But now that we have people using the platform it feels like
aggregating a service’s usage by month is:
- matches the timeframe users report on within their organisation
- is consistent with the usage page
And like the usage page this commit also limits the page to only show
one financial year’s worth of data at once (rather than data for all
time).
This commit also makes some changes to the jobs view code so that our
aggregation of failure states is consistent between the dashboard pages
and the jobs pages.
Right now we tell people that the usage page is for the current
financial year. This is a lie – it’s for all time.
So this commit calls through to the API to get the stats for (by
default) the current financial year.
We already do this for the monthly breakdown, this just does the same
thing for the yearly totals.
It also adds navigation to show the data for other financial years:
- previous so you can go back and see your usage and verify that the
bill you’re about to pay is correct
- next so that you can check what your SMS allowance is going to be
before you actually get into it
We have a bunch of different styles of handling when function
definitions span multiple lines, which they almost always do with tests.
Here’s why an argument per line, single indent is best:
- cleaner diffs when you change the name of a method (one line change
instead of multiple lines)
- works better on narrow screens, eg Github’s diff view, or with two
terminals side by side on a laptop screen
- works with any editor’s indenting shortcuts, no need for an IDE
Also, trailing comma in the list of arguments is good because adding a
new argument to a method becomes a one line, not two line diff.
Friday at 4pm is easier to understand than 14 October at 4pm, especially
when the UI you’ve used to choose this time has talked about days of the
week.
Basically:
- shows all the months from start of given financial year to now or end
of given financial year (whichever is earliest)
- shows a breakdown of free and paid text messages for each of these
months
Depends on:
- [x] https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-api/pull/699
This commit adds a placeholder page which, for now, just has links to
the API keys page and links to the clients.
There’s more stuff to come on this page, but this commit just does the
reorganising so that it’s easier to review.
On the dashboard:
- adds a new ‘in the next 24 hours’ section to the dashboard which lists
upcoming jobs
- tweaks some spacing on the dashboard so that it doesn’t look like too
much of a mess
- don’t show scheduled jobs in the table of normal jobs
On the jobs page:
- don’t show scheduled jobs
In research we found that developers orientate themselves around the
API clients rather than the documentation.
We should get them to the client documentation as quickly as possible.
We currently link to the API documentation in three places:
- API integration page
- global footer
- template ‘API info’ page
For the first two this commit:
- removes the link to the documentation
- adds links to each of the 5 clients
For the last one it just removes the link entirely.
we don't want to use the old statistics endpoints any more
also a couple of quality of life changes
* moves some logic out of the _totals.html template
* tidies up statistics_utils
This banner was always being shown because the template was never
getting sent the service’s templates from the API.
This commit fixes this to only show the banner when a service has no
templates, and adds some tests to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
