Vulnerable students contact form
Some users have a marker on their account that tells us they need extra help from us. We wanted to offer a contact form to those users, directly from their account. This would give them easier access to contact us when they needed extra help.
Before
Analysis
Unnecessary information
The suggested text lost the most important information.
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"Our team can answer your questions" does not add anything extra over 'Contact us'. If we want a lead in to make it clear what this form's for, we can probably write that in a better way.
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Not catered to users
​This content spends some time essentially encouraging users not to contact us. It tries to guess what their question is going to be.
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It's important to bring this back to the needs of the actual users that are being offered this service. These are explicitly students that have been flagged as having additional needs.
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These are users that are very likely to need extra help from us. We should not be adding blockers, or second-guessing what their needs are going to be.
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Input text boxes
The 'subject' and 'message' boxes are not great for accessibility. They have vague titles that do not directly tell a user what to put in those boxes. This could be missing vital context for screen readers especially.
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Secure message availability
It's important information that the contact form is not available at all times. If users access this page when it's closed, they can still 'send' a message, but will get an error. It's not a good user journey, and it will be worse if they miss the opening times information.
This information could be more prominent, so there's less risk the users are confused when they access this page when it's closed.
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There's also an inconsistency in the listing. 'Monday to Friday' is followed by a comma before the times. Saturday and Sunday is followed by an en dash before the 'closed'.
The solution
The content needs to be rewritten more clearly targeting the needs of these vulnerable users, and bringing it more into line with GDS standards.
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The contact form opening times needs to be more prominent, and the text fields need to be clear about what they're for.
Content changes
1. I removed a lot of the unnecessary information that tried to discourage users from using the form.
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2. I front-loaded the important information, like what the form was for, and how soon we would reply.
3. As the contact function is not always available, I made it more obvious when they could use the service by using an 'inset text' component. When our system is capable of using content blocks, this would be good content to use for one. As we'd be able to pull in the details wherever we need to talk about the form opening times.
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4. I also changed the language in the opening times to keep the focus on when it's actually available (Monday to Friday). Adding in 'Saturday and Sunday' risked obscuring the other days. This way, they can still get the information that it's closed on weekends, but it keeps the actual usable information more prominent.
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5. The 'subject' and 'message' boxes now have a clear instruction on what users should put in them. It's also much more approachable for vulnerable users, and more closely follows our tone of voice.
After
