What we learnt about our appointments service during a visit to Madrid
As the consular appointments alpha phase drew to a close, a visit to the Embassy in Madrid was a good opportunity for some face-to-face user testing, as well as a timely reminder of local conditions.
First of all, the Google map pin for the embassy address took me to the wrong side of the road. From a distance this might seem trivial, but in person I found myself on the wrong side of 10 lanes of the Paseo de la Castellana, one of the widest roads in Madrid:
[mappress mapid=”1″]
The same would happen to customers using the map from our booking confirmations, and we had reports of similar issues with address lookups in other locations. This led us to change our approach so that instead of relying on matching addresses, we now use custom links to add the exact map which we want for each consulate.
Once on the right side of the road, the next challenge was to get into the imposing Torre Espacio, once the tallest building in Spain. A colleague in our Overseas Residents Services Unit had wisely suggested that appointment confirmation emails should advise people to allow sufficient time to get through security, and here was a chance to experience that – it took me a good 15 minutes to do so, including two trips up and down in the lift before I could get to where I needed. Widest road, tallest building, what next?!
A video posted by Foreign & Commonwealth Office (@ukforeignoffice) on
Over the next couple of days I got to spend time testing the admin interface with our consular team, and the online booking pages with customers who had come in for services such as emergency travel documents and marriage documentation.
From customer user testing, I gained useful insights into international phone number input and where users would and wouldn’t scroll. The latter provided a timely answer to a debate we were having about adding extra information at the bottom of the confirmation page – the testing showed that this would be redundant as users would not see it. It was also encouraging to hear some very positive comments about the clarity and ease of use, and observe successful attempts to book, reschedule and cancel.
With the consular team we covered a whole range of areas. We looked at how to direct email notifications to different distribution lists depending on the service booked, how to set up custom schedules for each service, and compared the experience and implications of “bookings” as opposed to “reservations” – bookings are confirmed automatically, whereas reservations require a member of the team to check the details first and then confirm the appointment. We discussed the right place to include more detailed descriptive content, and the updates which would be needed on GOV.UK. We also identified ways to improve the training materials. Just observing people using the admin site, having had training, soon highlighted those areas which were more difficult to understand or configure than others. We also spent time figuring out the process for handling notarial appointments in Spain, where the posts work in a ‘hub and spoke’ model in which Madrid acts as the hub, fulfilling notarial services for the spokes in Alicante, Barcelona, Ibiza, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Malaga, Palma de Mallorca and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. All in all, plenty to discuss and scratch our heads over.
As this work has progressed we’ve been learning many lessons along the way, which I will summarise in my next post.
Follow Mark at @markbarlow