Making user journeys configurable in the GOV prototype kit

Making prototyping easier

I’m a massive advocate of prototyping ideas and putting them in front of users. This helps us to learn how a service may be used and solving problems or identifying challenges early on.

However, when you’re working with a prototype that might be large or have a few different routes within it, making changes when iterating can get complicated. For example, changing bank links next pages in the journey and routes depending on question responses. It can all get time consuming to start changing stuff repeatedly.

I faced this problem this week.

I have a prototype for a service which has about 50 pages and the journey has changed a few times based on user feedback, research and business needs.

The latest iteration aimed to simplify the journey as the previous journey had a check your answers page and a task list and just confused users. It felt like 2 disjointed services rather than one coherent journey.

I decided to take a step back and rather than change each pages back link and routing, I wanted to see if I could be a bit cleverer and make it more configurable.

I wanted a way for others in the team, unfamiliar with writing code or where just a part of a journey needs to change, to be able to change just a config file.

This has benefits for also being able to create and test different user journeys and easily supports A/B testing of different versions of pages too if needed. Just create a different version of the config file and you’re away.

The solution I have implemented, which has room for improvement and extending, is as follows:

This is a straightforward json file which allows for an array of pages.

page: the name of the file or view
back: the url for the back link
submit: the url for the form action
next: this is populated when there are no conditional routes
check: this is the url for the check your answers page if used
conditions: an array of options based on the form, in this example, there is a conditional route based on how a yes/no radio is answered.

Get request

This route for the get action, retrieves the config file and gets the config vales for the page “keep”, and the array object passed to the view data.

There is scope for improvement here, some validation is the object doesn’t exist and even some auto-generated routes based on the config.

Post request

With the post request, the values in the page object are used to determine where to go next. As the ‘keep’ page has conditions, these are used to set the redirect in an if statement.

This could be significantly improved by setting the form input name in the config, which is used in the conditions.

For now though, this works fine for what we need.

Using the page config in the view

As you’ll see the back link and submit links are set based on the config.

While there are lots of improvements that can be made, this fairly simple solution doesn't require much effort to implement. It enables you to make changes to your service journey quite easily, quickly and even on the fly if doing user research and the journey needs changing.

Related posts:

Nossos jogos podem ser jogados no desktop, tablet e celular para que você possa aproveitá-los na escola, em casa ou na estrada. Todos os meses, mais de 30 milhões de jogadores de todo o mundo jogam…

Di setiap awal Mei ada 2 hari besar yang menjadi perhatian bangsa ini, yaitu hari buruh 1 mei, lalu hari pendidikan 2 mei. kedua hari ini akan menjadi topik yang tak pernah habis untuk dibahas setiap…

Persistence Market Research (PMR) delivers key insights on the global soft tissue repair market in its latest report titled, “Soft Tissue Repair Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast…