The tour teaches you how Notify works by letting you do a thing and then
showing you the effect of the thing you’ve just done – a text message on
your phone.
This is not as effective if you don’t get the text message quickly. It
breaks the association you make between what you’ve done on the computer
and what’s happening on your phone.
Slow text message delivery can happen if you’re doing a big job. We can
get around this by making your text message use the priority queue.
This was observed in the pilot research session yesterday.
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.
The support flow was using `yes` and `no` to mean emergency/not
emergency. But not in all places – in one place it was using
`True`/`False` instead.
We were treating anything other than `yes`/`no` as a non-answer, which
means ask the question again. Because of the `True`/`False` thing, there
was no way of the user providing a valid `yes`/`no` answer. Which means
that we just kept asking them the question again and again and they got
stuck in a loop.
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.
41fa158635 added a proper Jinja filter
for formatting lists, which was better than the previous macro-based
solution.
It didn’t, however, account for HTML properly. It did the default Jinja
thing of escaping everything. Since we render lists of placeholders
by putting HTML before and after each item, this didn’t work (the HTML
got escaped and appeared on the page).
So this commit does the escaping of HTML outside Jinja, in the
user-submitted bits of the input only, then passes the whole thing
through as a `Markup` instance which doesn’t get escaped by Jinja.
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
> Scottish Enterprise is Scotland's main economic development agency
> and a non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government.
– https://www.scottish-enterprise.com/about-us
For some reason their email domain is `scotent.co.uk` (but it redirects
to www.scottish-enterprise.com on the web for the some reason
¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
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
