Department for Education
Education
Sole interaction designer working in a team of content designers, business analysts, data scientists, product managers, and user researchers
Overview
A government tool to monitor attendance in schools, used by various educational bodies and internal DfE analysts. The service currently has over 20,000 signed up to share attendance with DfE and an 86% usage rate.
Daily Attendance Tracker, developed by the Department for Education, supports schools, local authorities, and trusts in England by providing comprehensive monitoring of student attendance through dashboards and reports.
These reports serve as critical tools for government and school officials to make informed decisions aimed at enhancing pupil attendance. Notably, the focus is on identifying and addressing the needs of vulnerable children who may otherwise be at risk of slipping through the cracks.
Declining levels of pupil attendance after lockdown
During the COVID lockdown, schools witnessed a significant decline in pupil attendance rates, posing challenges for schools, local authorities, and trusts in England to devise strategies for improving attendance, particularly in underperforming areas.
Before 2020, the process of collecting pupil attendance data was infrequent and laborious. Schools manually entered data for each student once a term, which was then submitted to the Department for Education to assess national performance. This delayed data collection made it challenging to provide timely guidance to schools on improving attendance or addressing early signs of declining attendance.
Talking to users
#1 No relevancy
Low conversion rates as schools were required to go through a long process to sign-up to the tool.
Example: The sign-up feature required 2 weeks for processing and many said by the time their account was opened, they had found another way to acquire the information.
Impact: The initial sign-up rate was 38%, a lot of users began the process and ended up clicking out of the tool.
#2 Cognitive overload
Excessive data without categorising led to users getting overwhelmed.
Example: The main table included 14 columns of data, with no option to filter or search what they were looking for.
Impact: This led to users looking at the wrong sets of data and drawing incorrect conclusions.
#3 Dead ends
It was unclear what a school was expected to do with the data or how to proceed through the journey.
Example: There were no clear CTA's once they accessed the dashboard or options to export/print.
Impact: Users were having to screenshot the dashboard and then copy out this information into their own systems which took too much time. Resulted in low retention rates.
User journey mapping
Outlining the experience the user had with the tool, highlighting their emotions and building a narrative to highlight opportunities for improvements.
Key analytics
Reviewing usage and retention rates, duration and geographical usage using Microsoft Clarity.
Interviews
1 to 1 interviews conducted with schools and local authorities main users of the tool to identify pain points and manage expectations.
To understand who our users were, we interviewed three different groups as each one had a different user need. We needed to understand how each group would acheive the goal of the product and be a frequent user and what would motivate them to continue using the tool.
School Headteacher
Looking to get quick insights on attendance. Finds huge amounts of data difficult to decipher so wants key statistics to make decisions.
'"I want to see attendance data from the previous day when I log in every morning and find the students with unexplained absences."
Local Authority Officer
Comfortable analysing large quanities of data and relaying this back to schools.
"I want to export all the data to do my own analysis on a frequent basis."
Trust Attendance Leader
Hesitant to use new data tool but willl try it out if it saves a lot of time.
'"I like to create reports on how the schools in my trust are performing and target the schools that are performing lower."
Convenience
Users wanted key stats to be drawn without having to do manual calculations to monitor a child's attendance.
Transparency
It should be clear how often data is refreshed. Users want to feel confident using the tool.
Sharing
It should be easy to share attendance data with local authorities or parents.
Easy onboarding
Current journey to access the tool required too many permissions and deterred them from using the service consistently.
Search
Addition of a search filter to quickly find attendance of a pupil.
New dashboard
Taking into account feedback from users on what key stats they would like to see on a daily basis with a search feature to find a pupil easily.
Easy sign-up
Reduced the number of steps for onboarding, with a single-sign up and log in process.
Page navigation
Reduced the number of individual pages within Power BI and re-organised page navigation.
Accessibility
Internal audit
Carried out an internal audit of tool before it was ready for a Service Assessment. Used these findings to make accessibility improvements.
Accessibility tools
Carried out changes to the tool to make it compatible with screen readers and A11Y Colour Contrast Accessibility Validator.
Easy sign-up
Reduced the number of steps for onboarding, with a single-sign up and log in process.
Page navigation
Reduced the number of individual pages within Power BI and re-organised page navigation.
What we learnt
Know the limitations
Speaking to Power BI developers helped me gain an understanding of how to make tools accessbible way before I started designs.
To not assume
I had to consider the fact that our users were not familiar with how dashboards work. As a result, I focused on creating a user-friendly page navigation system. This understanding of our users' experiences also helped me design data visuals that were specifically tailored to their needs.
Fail fast
It's a necessary step to ensure whatever you create is exactly what users want. I created multiple iterations of concepts and tested them fast to rule them out as not desirable.
Reflections
At the beginning, the focus was solely on the product and how it would look and function by itself. An MVP was launched with little user research or insights, with the goal of providing a tool to help schools track pupil attendance. However, a large part of building a successful tool was missing beyond the actual UX and design. How would onboarding work? What would be the steps for account creation? Would we need to provide tutorials to help users onboard? What happens when they need troubleshooting?What I discovered was that these processes of product development, onboarding, usage, and support don't act alone, or you risk ending up with a brilliant tool with low usage and retention rates. It confirmed my understanding of how product development works: to create a great tool, it's not just about great UX but also about the experience of the whole journey.