Design notes
Users often need to add several items of the same type. For example, they may need to list family members, previous addresses, health conditions, qualifications or employers.
Design goals
When we began developing this pattern there were a number of different approaches to this in existing services, both in DWP and across government.
Most implementations were based on existing patterns developed by the Home Office, Ministry of Justice or HMRC: our aim was to learn from each of these patterns to agree a standard for DWP services.
What we did
Design workshop
After researching the existing patterns and their development, we held a workshop to ask DWP teams about their own ‘add another’ journeys and why they worked as they did.
We learned that:
Guidance at the start of the task helped people to realise they could add more entries later. Some people would otherwise try to add all their information in the first go.
There seem to be different needs; speed for internal services and clarity for public facing services.
‘Chunking’ Check Answers pages could help reduce the cognitive load of a massive Check Your Answers at the end of a form. Could the final Check your answers summarise the 'Add another' data and link back to a review page allowing for ‘Change’ and ‘Remove’?
Teams should recognise that Add another can alter the onward journey - removing an entry can remove other data elsewhere, or change eligibility.
Where possible, agents value a system that can support the non-linear flow of face-to-face and phone conversations with citizens, so they can quickly jump around the form.
Working prototype
For the Add another thing pattern, we recognised that storing and retrieving data was not a straightforward prototyping task. We therefore built a mock food delivery service for designers to copy, with detailed instructions on how to code it using the GOV.UK Prototype Kit.
Design choices
Single page or repeated loop?
The biggest design choice was between adding items to a single page and then submitting all at once, as in the HMRC pattern, or a ‘hub and spoke’ model where a loop is repeated and builds a summary list page.
We chose the second option of a repeated loop. This allows for more complex items to be added – each item can be built from several questions – and also means each item's fields can be validated before adding to the list.
Research at the Ministry of Justice found that adding all items to a single screen and then submitting caused performance and validation problems.
Add another: radios or secondary button?
We found two basic mechanisms for users to say they wanted to add another thing:
- a secondary button labelled something like ‘Add another x’
- a yes/no question with radios: ‘Would you like to add another x? [Yes / No]’
We chose to use a secondary button. Research on an internal HMRC system found that the radio option caused confusion. The secondary button option also saves the user a click and avoids them having to answer an additional question.
Next steps
We want to understand more about this pattern in use. We will keep it under review and update it as we learn from teams' research with users.
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