We are reviewing phase banner

[hazalarpalikli]

We have completed our desk research and reviewed community feedback into the phase banner component. Our findings showed that it is not working well. We are creating this space to specifically ask the community for feedback on these topics:

• Are you using phase banner outside the standard alpha, beta label? Can you give us examples?
• Does your service and end users find the phase banner useful? If so how?

We will also share updates on this work using this space.

You can also find the previous backlog issue for this work using this link

Important

We'd like to know your thoughts on this topic. Ways you can give us feedback on this:

• Add a comment to this discussion
• Give feedback to the Design System team by email
• Give feedback via the #govuk-design-system or by DM-ing me on UK Government Digital slack

[matteason]

Are you using phase banner outside the standard alpha, beta label? Can you give us examples?

Yes, we have a webforms product which uses the Design System and can be toggled between GOV.UK and non-GOV.UK branding depending on the customer. For non-GOV.UK public sector services where the alpha/beta label isn't applicable, we omit the tag but keep the feedback link. We want people to be able to give feedback at any point in the journey - for example if they reach a dead end and want to give feedback on why. We're not wedded to the current component though.

Does your service and end users find the phase banner useful? If so how?

Personally I don't see much value in the 'phase' bit of the phase banner - certainly not Beta. So many live-but-not-"Live" services are in perma-beta that the label is probably pretty meaningless to users at this point. For example, on the X-Govuk services list the number of Live services is hugely outnumbered by the Beta services, some of which have been in Beta for years.

I do think having a prominent feedback mechanism in a consistent place is valuable, but I wouldn't be opposed to it being more like the GOV.UK feedback banner and be above the footer rather than below the header:

[querkmachine]

Are you using phase banner outside the standard alpha, beta label? Can you give us examples?

The call is coming from inside the house, but in the Design System team we sometimes use the phase banner for something other than stating the project's development phase or to gather feedback.

For example, the current development environment:

Or that the content being viewed is a draft and not intended for public consumption:

Probably less relevant as neither of these use cases are meant to be public-facing, but useful nonetheless.

[owenatgov]

It's certainly a consideration for us, and I think all GDS frontend repos? At least the ones that have a local preview/preview link mechanism. GOV.UK do something similar for identifying between production and staging environments. It wouldn't surprise me if other folks in government have copied this (did we copy it from someone else?).

We're co-opting the phase banner and using it improperly to meet a specific need and we've gotten away with it... until now. If we get rid of it, we may want to think about either co-opting something else (less than ideal) or building some sort of internal pattern for identifying that something isn't the live site.

This is far from the top of the priority list for this work but something we'll have to think about.

[c-serpent]

Are you using phase banner outside the standard alpha, beta label? Can you give us examples?

At the Apprenticeship service we use the standard phase banner for alpha/beta labelling. We haven't had any need to take any non-standard approaches.

Does your service and end users find the phase banner useful? If so how?

Our end-users are overwhelmingly neutral to the phase banner. Users rarely acknowledge the phase banner's existence at all. When we do usability testing of our services, the phase banner is regularly a victim of 'banner blindness'. When we directly prompt users about the phase banner component, they do understand the banner and what it means, but that's very much a forced behaviour.

Because the phase banner is ignored so often, the performance of the 'feedback' link in the banner also suffers. In recent months, we have been looking at other appoaches to getting feedback on services within DfE. This has included feedback components placed at the end of specific transactions, and feedback components placed in the footer of an overall service. Steve Milnes has already touched on this in his comment on the following card: #4976 (comment)