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Rethinking the publish workflow

Publishing before transition was complicated. Each training location had a state and a publish flag, which determines if the course appears in Find and can be applied to on UCAS Apply. Then the content has its own state – Empty, Draft or Published.

You could write and publish content for new courses on Publish, they’d be labelled green, but they would not appear online if the user had not set their training locations to running in UCAS (or if UCAS had not approved this by setting the publish flag to yes).

User research

Screenshot of courses quiz.

We tested this courses quiz with users to see if they understood each state given the information provided.

Example states (second iteration)

Changes in this design:

  • replaced Last published column with an ‘Is it on Find?’ column, to be explicit
  • removed view on website link, making the Find status the link itself
  • changed the ‘Draft #2’ state to be clear that it is published and on Find, the concept of ‘second edition’ is not needed yet

This is the design we tested in the quiz with users.

Course Status Is it on Find? Applications Vacancies
New course, just added (N123) PGCE with QTS full time New No – still in draft
Draft course, not published (DD23) QTS full time Draft No – still in draft
Published, but has unpublished changes (D123) QTS full time Published *
- Unpublished changes
Yes – view online Open Yes (Edit)
Published course (P123) PGCE with QTS full time Published Yes – view online Open Yes (Edit)
Published before applications open (PP23) PGCE with QTS full time Published Yes – view online Open from
3 Mar 2019
Yes (Edit)
Published but full (PC23) QTS full time Published Yes – view online Closed No (Edit)
Withdrawn course (W123) QTS full time Withdrawn No – withdrawn Closed No

Example states (initial design)

Problems identified with this design in peer review, before user research:

  • ‘View on website’ is not a clear enough indicator that the course is on Find
  • ‘Draft #2’ was universally misunderstood – it’s live but has unpublished changes, people thought it was not live
  • The last published column was not useful
Course Status Last published Applications Vacancies?
New course, just added (N123) QTS full time New
Draft course, not published (DD23) QTS full time Draft
Draft course, published before (D123) QTS full time – View on website Draft #2 10 August 2018 Open Yes (Edit)
Published course (P123) QTS full time – View on website Published 10 August 2018 Open Yes (Edit)
Published before applications open (PP23) QTS full time – View on website Published 10 August 2018 Open from
6 October 2018
Yes (Edit)
Published but full (PC23) QTS full time – View on website Published 10 August 2018 Closed No (Edit)
Withdrawn course (W123) QTS full time Withdrawn Withdrawn on
10 August 2018
Closed No
Rolled over course (R123) QTS full time Rollover