One of my team was having trouble trying to work out how to present this information to a user without it being overwhelming. She needed to tell users what evidence they needed to send us, but also explain how certain evidence could be used for multiple items. It was a lot of information to digest on one page.
Evidence flow
Before
Analysis
My team member had tried to section the evidence requirement based on the income type a user was telling us about. She'd also treated the guidance on duplicate evidence as its own item, as it was too much to combine in one.
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She had put every income type as a details drop-down component. So when each was selected, it would reveal what evidence we needed for that item.
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Issues:
Complexity
There is a huge amount of information on this page to digest, and it's difficult to scan.
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Repetition
When the details components are opened, they each list what evidence counts for that income type. As certain evidence can be used on multiple income types, this means the same items are repeated all the way down the page.
Details component
The details component can help make a page easier to scan if you have information that only some of your users need. But it is for one section of content, not 8, as we have here.
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The way this is laid out is very visually confusing, and the users potentially have to open multiple of these to get the information they need.
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Once they've worked out which evidence they need to send in for each item, they then find from the warning text component evidence can count for multiple items. This then creates extra cognitive load for a user to work out what we've asked for, which evidence items count for which income type, and then remember what we've asked for on the next page.
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Warning text
It was the right choice to use the warning text component to call attention to the shared evidence guidance. But there is too much information here, so it get lost. It also creates a lot of bold text, which can be hard to read.
The solution
I went through the user flow with this content designer to see how someone gets to this point.
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​We talked about how we could reduce the cognitive load on a user and help them work out what evidence we needed.
Content changes
A user has reached this screen after telling us they have another income. I helped my content designer think about other ways we could tackle this flow, as it's clearly too much information for a single screen.
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I showed her how we could explain this more effectively if we split it into 2 different screens. The first screen is treated like a new question, where we explain that we need to know what types of income a user has. They are listed in order of the most common types of income users tell us about.
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Users are already thinking about what type of income they want to tell us about in the screen before this one, so, here it should be easier for them to choose which ones they need.
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By making this question a list of checkboxes, a user can choose as many as they need to tell us about.
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Once a user's chosen their income types, and chosen 'save and continue', they're taken to the second screen.
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Using logic in the backend, this second screen can pull in the items this user needs to send us. For example, if a user needs to send us a tax return for being a company director, and a tax return and a P60 for the salary income, the second screen just asks for a tax return and a P60.
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This avoids repeating the same instructions multiple times on a screen, will be easier for users to remember, and avoids the risk of them submitting duplicate evidence.
After
