DfE Mentoring Dashboard

Redesigning a Department for Education dashboard around outstanding actions

A school induction tutor signing in needs to know one thing first: which early career teachers still need a mentor. The old dashboard made them hunt for it.

This was user-centred design work I led as senior interaction designer on the schools team at the Department for Education. The dashboard supports schools managing training and information under the Early Career Framework, the statutory support programme for early career teachers, known as ECTs. The people using it are school induction tutors, who assign mentors to ECTs and keep track of who still needs one.

Client

Department for Education

Role

Senior Interaction Designer

Date

2023

UCD Team

Darren Courtney - Senior IxD

Dale Moore - Content design

Elena Bracey - User research

Costa Christou - User research

Zoe Popperwell - User research

The problem

The existing dashboard buried actions and statuses inside tabs, a pattern users had learned to skip past. The status labels added to the confusion, because they did not match how tutors thought about a teacher's progress. The tool held the right information, but made the most important question, what needs doing now, hard to answer.

The design

I rebuilt the dashboard around one principle: surface outstanding actions and hide everything else. Mentors were listed with their assigned ECTs nested underneath, grouped with light horizontal rules. Names were the only links in the list, which took the guesswork out of where to go next. Statuses moved into colour-coded tags, and I reworked the status names so they matched tutors' mental models rather than the system's. A warning component pulled any unassigned ECT to the top of the page; once a mentor was assigned, the warning cleared and the teacher settled into place. The whole thing was mobile-first and responsive.

Two decisions worth keeping

Testing surfaced a problem I would not have predicted. The primary action button had been placed at the foot of the page, on the assumption that users might otherwise miss the content above it. On smaller screens it dropped off the visible area, and some tutors read it as belonging to the tabs above, a hangover from the old design. The fix was to stop using placement to force people past content, and instead put the action where users were already looking for it.

Routing took three iterations to settle. Changing an ECT's mentor sent users to different places depending on whether they had clicked the mentor or the teacher. Making it consistent left the confirmation unclear; routing straight back to the list cluttered the page. The version that worked was a dedicated confirmation page with a clear heading and a single action back to the management view. Not the first idea, but the right one.

Testing on real data

The team also piloted a different way of validating the work. Instead of a conventional prototype, we built a review app from the development branch and tested on real data. For a tool this interconnected, that exposed issues a hard-coded prototype would have hidden, and it meant a tested design could move towards release without being rebuilt. The standard prototype kit still had its place for isolated component testing, but for work this complex the review app was the better instrument.

What I took from it

This was a large, complex piece of work, and the lasting lesson from it was simple. A dashboard like this could surface everything the system holds, yet the real work was leaving most of it off the page, so the one thing that mattered, a teacher still without a mentor, was impossible to miss.