Thoughts from DWP Digital design Patterns meet-up #2
If you missed it I did some thoughts from Meetup #1.
for this meet-up the focus was navigation.
The day was split into two parts — in the morning Craig did a deep dive into the agent service for Bereavement payment service. He talked about how they had designed the end-to-end processes with agents.
The afternoon was setup to allow us to talk about what navigation is, and how it is applied in services.
We come up with the following definition for what is navigation:
The thing which enables a journey
We had a lot of chat about this, we had variations where “the thing” was elements, and enables was allows. We also talked about a task, finding a thing — but they all had similar intent.
We also did post-it note sorting to talk about thee different types we have found in our services and in Government.
This helped us sort navigation into three main areas — focused around where it happens.
Top/footer navigational elements provide glue for wider navigation. In the header of the site we talked about various naming global, main and primary these had things like account navigation, top bar menus and breadcrumbs
The second area was in page navigation, this included things like tabs, groups of links and side links.
This isn’t a full list but it gives you some idea of the different elements that have been used to enable navigation between connected content.
Below is an example of tabs taken from the Bereavement service, you can see more about it on github. This gives a bit more context about how and why it is being used.
We’ve seen a couple different examples of this, so it seemed a good choice to talk about more.
Take aways
- People are starting to think about how we start to take these things forward, which is the next steps
- We need to engage wider then our current services
- We need more user researchers in the room
