Digital Service Design Weeknotes

13 July — 26 July

This sprint’s weeknotes are brought to you by Abbie our Business Support Manager and Kerry our Content Designer.

Designing accepting a large grant

As we continue to build out the new investment management service, this sprint has seen us thinking about, and starting to design, content for how applicants might accept their grant and how we will communicate their award.

We started by assessing what we know and the evidence we have so far.

Some of the things we know:

• user research to-date has primarily focused on applicants and grantees applying for grants of between £3,000 to £250,000,
• grantees of this higher level, £250,000 to £5million, are experienced in applying for large grants. They have strong mental models of what to expect in a grant-giving service and do not have the same pain points in their user journey as grantees accepting small and medium grants,
• contracts for large grants can be much more detailed and complicated than the lower grant levels, with lots of individual additional conditions,
• the application form for delivery round grants has been built in Salesforce Community, rather than funding frontend.

Looking at what we know helped us to make some initial decisions.

Some of the things we decided:

• to start with the current legal documents that make up the process The Fund calls Permission to Start. This includes the grant notification letter, declaration and Permission to Start. Without deviating too much from the current flow of content, we applied some content design principles to make content more readable and navigable through headings, subheadings, and structure,
• our Service Designer Rosa is exploring different journeys for large grantees to go through when accepting an award. Thinking about the current journey, what happens for small and medium, the capabilities of Salesforce Experience and the longer user journey for progress reporting and project evaluation,
• accepting there is a lot to think about and explore! This sprint has been about looking at different options, tradeoffs, what can — and can’t be in scope, and working together as a wider service design team to start planning what we might build for MVP for large. It is important to remember that this is an MVP and will be iterated as we learn more about users and move away from using GEMS and Top Level.

Design a way for users to report progress and spending

Another important part of the grant process is making sure people can tell us about their project and let us know what they’ve spent, so we can make grant payments in arrears for medium grants over £100,000 and large grants over £250,000.

Firstly, we mapped the current flow for users to get a payment and tell us about the progress of their project. We looked at how many steps there are and the overall flow. We broke up the main chunks of the process so each person could work on designing a different part. There are 3 main chunks of work with this including:

1. What do people need to tell us about the project?
2. How do they tell us about project spend?
3. How do they give us their organisation’s bank details for grants this size?

A Miro frame showing what users need to get a payment shown through digital sticky notes

In the old progress report, a grantee would need to gather all their information and documents together and complete the whole thing as a form. In our new design, we have broken it up into smaller, more manageable pieces. We’ve focused on using plain English to ask questions or explain what we mean throughout. This way we can avoid jargon and unnecessarily complicated wording to reduce the cognitive load and help grantees get through the flow faster. By smoothing out the process we can hopefully reduce the time people spend trying to understand or process what we are saying and free them up to spend more time on the project.

For the design of the pages, we looked at examples of how other organisations and government services presented this type of information. For consistency, we continued to use the Gov.UK design system patterns which is what we’ve used throughout the funding front end. This is a repository of components and patterns that are frequently used on Government websites so are familiar to many. The other benefit of using the patterns is that they have all been tested and shown to work well with users.

Using the Gov.UK design patterns allows us to build prototypes and examples of what pages might look like without having to build things into the code which takes longer and is more expensive in terms of staff time. Using a drawn prototype, we can see pages, flows and journeys in a less final, more fluid way — a low fidelity prototype. This means we can make changes quickly based on feedback we get from the team or during our co-designing calls.

A low fidelity prototype task list allowing users to tell us their progress, what they have spent and add bank details. Users are also able to check their answers. The project information is displayed on the right as a reference

Once we had the whole journey mapped out and content added we were able to take a step back from the detail and see the bigger picture. This is still a work in progress so we will carry on working on this in the next sprint but it’s a good step in extending what the service can do.

Built out accepting a medium grant in the service

Paul, our developer has been busy building out accepting a grant for grants of £10,000 to £250,000. The journey for users is the same as for small grants, but the content is slightly different. This work involved Paul working closely with content design to understand what content needs to be built on which page, and with what type of functionality.

As part of the medium grant build, we also explored how we could add Additional grant conditions to contracts for medium grants. We know additional conditions are a rare occurrence for small, but slightly more common for medium. We explored different options with Jamie, our product owner, to think about where in Salesforce staff might add Additional conditions. How will they be pulled through into the service? How will they be shown to grantees? Who needs to see them? We also made a slight iteration to the declaration as part of this work, as when we originally started scoping out accepting your grant — pre-pandemic — Additional conditions were going to sit on a different page within the service. They have moved from the Your Project page to Terms and conditions, so we iterated the content, checked it with legal, and added it to the service to reflect this. This is a small example of how the team works together and iterates as we go, based on what we learn and changes to design.

Prototype of Additional grant conditions, with instructions for developers and dynamic content highlighted to show content that will be pulled through from Salesforce once added by Investment Managers

Ran open surgeries for the Investment Management Service

As more of the organisation are using the new Investment Management Service we set up a series of optional sessions where staff can come along and ask questions directly to the service design team. So far, we’ve had two of three sessions and covered things like how to see ‘My Projects’ in Salesforce, how to filter projects, and how to use lists. We also had a chance to share a few live demos of different parts of Salesforce and the frontend of the service. The surgery felt like a great opportunity to share experiences. The final session for now is on Wednesday 4th August.