Choose alternative contact formats

Make it easy to request accessible formats for letters and phone calls

Choose alternative contact formats is a standard way of presenting alternative contact options for people who need alternatives to letters or telephone calls from DWP: for example, large print, Braille or sign language.

The pattern is designed to work as part of a citizen’s application journey for a benefit, but could also be modified for use in an agent-facing service.

Principles

• offer accessible formats for both written and spoken communications
• make it easy to request other formats
• consider that a person’s needs may change

When to use this pattern

Any service that provides information must take steps to make that information equally available to everyone: this can include providing it in formats such as Braille or sign language.

This pattern asks users about their communication needs.

When to consider something else

This pattern is for written and spoken communications from you to your users (outbound communications). To tell people how they can contact you (inbound communications), use the Contact a service pattern.

The journey is designed to collect information for the first time (for example in an application or registration journey). If a user needs to update information they have already given you then another design may be more suitable.

Design goals and metrics

The goal of the pattern is to make requesting formats as easy as possible. Introducing this pattern to an existing service should increase the number of requests a service receives.

Compared to a service that uses open text fields or notes to collect this information, this pattern should improve data quality and structure.

Working example

This pattern has a working example that shows how the whole journey works. You can drop this example into your prototype using the plugin for the GOV.UK prototype kit.

Discuss on GitHub

There is a public discussion for this topic on GitHub where you can share anything you think might be useful. Discuss Choose alternative contact formats on GitHub.

Get support

Need help implementing this in a prototype or production build? Get support from the Design System team.

Give feedback

We depend on insights from real projects to update and improve the design system. If you use something we made, tell us how it went.

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Last updated: 1 December 2023