Note, we choose to start our urls at step-1 rather than step-0 as this
is consistent when you would enter the first placeholder (excluding the
recipient) for the one off tour.
Also note, we expect a service to allow international sms by default
when it is first created but we keep the check for if the service does
just in case they visit this tour later on.
If you’re adding another area to your broadcast it’s likely to be close
to one of the areas you’ve already added.
But we make you start by choosing a library, then you have to find the
local authority again from the long list. This is clunky, and it
interrupts the task the user is trying to complete.
We thought about redirecting you somewhere deep into the hierarchy,
perhaps by sending you to either:
- the parent of the last area you’d chosen
- the common ancestor of all the areas you’d chosen
This approach would however mean you’d need a way to navigate back up
the hierarchy if we’d dropped you in the wrong place. And we don’t have
a pattern for that at the moment.
So instead this commit adds some ‘shortcuts’ to the chose library page,
giving you a choice of all the parents of the areas you’ve currently
selected. In most cases this will be one (unitary authority) or two
(county and district) choices, but it will scale to adding areas from
multiple different authorities.
It does mean an extra click compared to the redirect approach, but this
is still fewer, easier clicks compared to now.
This meant a couple of under-the-hood changes:
- making `BroadcastArea`s hashable so it’s possible to do
`set([BroadcastArea(…), BroadcastArea(…), BroadcastArea(…)])`
- making `BroadcastArea`s aware of which library they live in, so we can
link to the correct _Choose area_ page
previously the back link went to choosing a library.
Now, if you view a district from a county, go back to the county page.
Otherwise, go back to the top level of the library.
For a training broadcast the user doesn’t get that immediate feedback
that something has happened, like they would with a real alert, or even
sending themselves a text message.
This commit adds another tour-style page which will interrupt their
journey and hopefully reinforce the message we’ve given them earlier in
the tour.
We’re adding this because we’ve found in research that users don’t have
a good grasp of the consequences and severity of emergency alerts,
versus regular text messages.
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.
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
We’ve shown the broadcast tour to a few users now. We’ve learned what
concepts about broadcasting are and aren’t getting through.
So what we’re emphasising here is:
- the thing that appears on the phone (the ‘emergency alert’) not the
technology (a ‘broadcast’)
- how it’s different to other channels of messaging, eg text
We’ve generally spent a lot more time on the content and illustrations
this time around, so overall it’s should be clearer and shorter.
This also expands the communication of training mode into the header,
so it’s visible on every page (we can add another one for ‘live’
services later on).
Since we added the end time picker:
- we have discovered that broadcasts can’t be longer than 24h
- we have observed that most users confuse picking the end time for
scheduling the message, or don’t understand exactly what it means for
the broadcast to ‘end’
- we’ve developed the concept of ‘training mode’, which you should be
going through before sending a real broadcast
We also think that, for most scenarios, you won’t necessarily know when
a broadcast should end at the time of starting it because the cause of
the danger is not within your control. So giving you control of the
end time before the broadcast has even been approved is a confusing
distraction.
Having to pick a time at all also makes the whole process feel more
planned and less immediate. Whereas in reality all the phones in the
area will be getting the message in seconds. It’s only people coming
into the area later to whom the ‘ongoing’ aspect of the broadcast
applies.
The best place to explain what’s happening with the phones is at the
approval stage and once you’ve sent your first (training mode)
broadcast. It’s easier to explain what’s happened if it’s in direct
response to something you’ve just done.
Later on we should add some kind of email reminder after 12 hours to
make sure you still want the broadcast live, again after 18 hours, etc.
We could let you schedule an end time once the broadcast is live, but
don’t think there’s a strong need. Knowing enough that you want to
cancel is one thing, but knowing enough to want to cancel but wanting to
wait a bit… nah.
This shows the green banner with a tick when cancelling a user's
invitation to a service or organisation. The accessibility audit noted
that 'When cancelling an invite a new page loads, however, there is no
immediate indication that the invite has been cancelled.'
In order to display the invited user's email address as part of the
flash message, this adds new methods to the api clients for invites to get
a single invite.
We had two identical callback form classes. One for delivery callbacks
and one for inbound sms callbacks. Since they did not differ I consolidated
them into one CallbackForm class that they both inherited from previously.
I also substituted field classes for this form with new fields
that cooperate with gov uk frontend.
Changes those fields in the following forms:
- SearchByNameForm
- SearchUsersByEmailForm
- SearchUsersForm
- SearchNotificationsForm
Includes changes to templates that use this form
and associated tests.
At the moment viewing a broadcast is limited to those users who have
the `send_messages` permission.
This doesn’t match how we describe the permissions on the team members
page
This commit makes it so that any team member can see a broadcast that’s
in any state other than `draft`.
If a library has groups, we should show a link instead of selecting the
group directly.
Then we can give the user the choice of selecting the whole of that
group, or specific areas within the group.
For now the only libraries we have with groups are local authorities,
which group electoral wards.
We’ve decided that this feature should be self-service, and on by
default for all users. Before we can make it on by default we should
give users a way to switch it off for themselves. Which is what this PR
does.
`EmailPreviewTemplate.subject` returns a string of HTML, with any
user-submitted HTML already escaped:
b5a61bfb7b/notifications_utils/template.py (L672)
What won’t be escaped is the HTML needed to redact the placeholders. We
generate this HTML so we know its safe, and doesn’t need to be escaped.
However when we pass it to Jinja, Jinja doesn’t know this, so will try
to escape it. This means users will see the raw HTML.
We can get around this by using Flask’s `Markup` class to tell Jinja
that the string is already sanitised and doesn’t need escaping again.
Text message templates don’t have this problem because they already
return `Markup`: b5a61bfb7b/notifications_utils/template.py (L288)
Letter templates don’t suffer from this problem (because they don’t
support redaction) but without making the same change they would still
double-escape ampersands, greater-than symbols, and so on.
Once you’ve created a broadcast you’re taken back to the dashboard. This
feels too passive, and you might miss that the broadcast still needs
approval.
We should be much more explicit that you now need to find someone to
approve your broadcast. Taking someone directly to the page for a
broadcast lets us give more information about the status of the
broadcast and what the next steps should be.
This is an initial, prototype-quality attempt at introducing some kind
of tour for users new to broadcasting. A lot of the users we’re speaking
to don’t have a good concept of what broadcasting means, which is
causing usability problems down the line.
We did a similar thing in the early days of Notify to explain the
concept of message templates and personalisation.
We’re now normalising and storing the whole address in the
`normalised_to` field. Previously we were only storing the first line
of the address.
Enough time should now have passed that the field will have been
populated for all letters in the database.
Thus we can now tell users that it’s not just the first line they can
search by.
When sending a letter we check how many pages it has and this number
then determines how many PNG images we ask template preview for. When
calculating the page count, we were getting the page count for the
template as it comes from the database (so without any placeholders
filled in). But filling in placeholders in a letter may cause the number
of pages to change, which was the cause of the 'Letter does not have a
page x' errors we were seeing from template-preview.
Now, when we calculate the letter page count during sending, we take the
placeholders that have already been filled in into account.
It’s an irreversible action if you do click it, so it feels like an ‘Are
you sure?’ step is sensible. Follows the same pattern for deleting
templates, etc.
Different emergencies will need broadcasts to last for a variable amount
of time. We give users some control over this by letting them stop a
broadcast early. But we should also let them set a maximum broadcast
time, for:
- when the duration of the danger is known
- when the broadcast has been live long enough to alert everyone who
needs to know about it
This code re-uses the pattern for scheduling jobs, which has some
constraints that are probably OK for now:
- end time is limited to an hour
- longest duration is 3 whole days (eg if you start broadcasting Friday
you have the choice of Saturday, Sunday and all of Monday, up to
midnight)
If a broadcast definitely shouldn’t go out (for example because it has a
spelling mistake or is going to the wrong areas) then we should have a
way of removing it. Once it’s removed no-one else can approve it, and it
isn’t cluttering up the dashboard.
This is a link (because it’s a secondary action) and red (because it’s
destructive, in that it’s throwing away someone’s work).
Since new broadcasts will go into `pending-approval`, we now need a way
of approving them.
This commit adds a button to this page to start (or approve) the
broadcast. This button is wrapped in a bordered box, to emphasise that
it’s something consequential.
We don’t want one person going full yolo and start broadcasting without
any oversight. This commit changes the flow so that the button on the
‘preview’ page puts the broadcast into `pending-approval`, rather than
directly into `broadcasting`.
