We wanted to understand how providers currently find the service.
We also wanted to learn whether they have any need for a landing page collecting together services and information from the DfE.
Who we researched with
We carried out research sessions with 5 school-centred initial teacher training (SCITT) providers.
What we found
We found that:
- it is not easy to find the service
- there is no easy way to move between services
- DfE Sign-in is perhaps not being used as intended
- a landing page is only needed as a place to find services
Finding the service
Most participants access the service by clicking either:
- a link in one of the service’s email notifications
- a bookmark the participant created
Participants who rely on email notifications either search their inbox or wait for a new email to come in.
Participants who use a bookmark also have bookmarks for other DfE services. They need to have been able to find the service at least once to create the bookmark.
Many participants did not know that the service is called ‘Manage teacher training applications’. Some referred to the service as Publish or Apply. This would hinder any attempts to use search to reach the service, even if the service start page was indexed by search engines.
One participant did use search during the research session, but could only find the DfE Sign-in landing page.
Most participants had seen the list of services which is reached by signing in directly from the DfE Sign-in landing page. They had found that Manage and other related services are not on the list.
Moving between services
When using the service, there’s no easy way for users to move to related services like ‘Publish teacher training applications’. They might want to do that to close a course, for example.
Using DfE Sign-in
Participants did not appear to understand that DfE Sign-in provides a single set of credentials for them to access all DfE services.
Some participants use a shared inbox as their email address for DfE Sign-in. They also sometimes have more than one set of credentials. This is not how DfE Sign-in is intended to be used.
Participants belonging to multiple organisations with multiple email addresses were unsure which they should use to access certain services.
Needs for a landing page
The only user need we found for a landing page is for users to be able to access all the related services. Participants wanted to be able to access the service they require with the minimum of effort.