This week we released a performance dashboard for the service to get a lasting power of attorney - a complicated transaction which is pushing and pulling our dashboards into new areas.
Are you, like me, worried about your ongoing capacity to make decisions? Then you might want to create a lasting power of attorney - a legal document which lets you appoint someone to make decisions on your behalf should you fall ill or become incapacitated.
Having checked with my manager, it turns out that nominating an attorney to make all my work decisions for me ‘would not be appropriate’, but I am delighted to say that on Monday we launched a performance dashboard for the Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) service run by the Office of the Public Guardian.
Left, the new online service to get a Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA), with right, the new dashboard showing how the service is performing both on- and off-line
The dashboard is designed to show the LPA team the information they need to improve the service. So, the dashboard shows amongst other things:
- how the digital service is already beginning to be preferred by users despite no promotion at this stage
- information on the different steps users go through
- where users are clicking for extra help
Fees and reductions, the first button you come across, is by far the most-clicked help button
As with all dashboards at gov.uk/performance, the dashboard is also fully open to the public.
As I mentioned in a previous blog post about conversion funnels, getting a lasting power of attorney is a relatively complex thing to do, and representing it has pushed the platform to its limits; sometimes slightly over them. In particular, the ‘journey stages’ module has struggled. This transaction has a lot of stages in it and is in two quite distinct phases: first you have to make your LPA, and secondly you have to register it, which includes gathering physical signatures and (alas!) actually paying £110. Furthermore, users may return to individual stages having gathered more information, meaning that visitor numbers do not look like a classic conversion funnel with the largest number of visitors at the start and the smallest number at the end.
After discussions with the LPA team and some serious wrestling with how best to represent this, we have for now concentrated the module on the Make an LPA phase only, removed the easiest stages, replaced percentages with numbers, and removed the comparative information from the previous week:
Draft 1 of the drop offs graph for the Lasting Power of Attorney above; versus go-live draft 234.1b below
This information is more readable than before, and certainly more useful than not having a module: showing the number of visitors to each section can help identify which are getting the most use, or are being returned to frequently. However, it can be improved further. It doesn't tell us is what the user was previously doing, nor if significant numbers of users dropped out of the transaction at one of these stages. This is a really interesting area which we are actively exploring, and we will write more on it soon.
The LPA dashboard brings us up to 10 dashboards on the Platform and I look forward to learning more about this service and how it compares with the others. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful Performance Platform team who worked very hard on this, and the team at the Office of the Public Guardian who not only threw their considerable brainpower and energy at this dashboard but were also a pleasure to work with.
Follow Phil on Twitter: @philbuckley5
10 comments
Comment by Jaya Chakrabarti posted on
Just wondering if there are any plans to enable those with LPA to be able to manage suppliers for their loved ones through a single digital dashboard? To negotiate discounts/keep prices down on utilities and communications services etc? Having to manage a whole new set of service providers is proving to be quite challenging and I'm pretty sure the user experience can be improved significantly.
Comment by Elle Jay posted on
Your page is not responding!
Comment by Carrie Barclay posted on
Hi Elle. Thanks for your message. Could you let me know which page you are referring to so I can look into it?
Many thanks.
Comment by Andrew Wong posted on
Great post - but alas all the images have disappeared from it!
Comment by Carrie Barclay posted on
Thanks for bringing this to our attention - I'm working on getting the image problem sorted! Carrie
Comment by David Pearce posted on
I'm working on a project with a very similar outcome - a legally binding document that people can use to express their wishes (advance decisions) would there be anyone who I could have a chat about this with?
I'm very interested in what user needs where identified and how you went about the build?
(Hope this isn’t too cheeky of a question)
Love the dashboard btw.
Dave
Comment by Simon Manby posted on
At the risk of sounding sychophantic, Phil, it has been an absolute pleasure working with you and your team from inception to release. I think the PP is looking excellent, and the data returned has already been useful to the business, particularly in looking at how we improve the tool in the future. Thanks again.
Comment by Steve Hoy posted on
Phil
Looks like a really good start. If you want the in-page information (whether a field was interacted with, last field completed on an abandoned page, etc.) then we could feed this data straight in to your performance platform in near real-time without the need to include any additional tagging. Steve
Comment by Irene Melo (@IreneMelo) posted on
That is very interesting, Phil.
Have you tested the new LPA tool with users yet?
Comment by Phil Buckley posted on
Hi Irene, thanks for reading.
It has been tested with the LPA team yes, though as soon as we released it to general users we got some feedback that the labelling wasn't clear enough if you didn't know the transaction well. We've made a couple of changes which should be released early next week.
Best wishes -
P