Ask users for addresses

[bencullimore]

What

Help users provide an address using one of the following:

Address lookup Multiple text inputs Textarea

(https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/addresses/ but in the context of health)

Why

A number of services have used the GOV pattern and it could be improved...

[StephenHill-NHSBSA]

We are currently planning to use a pattern which is currently in use on the "Apply for a budgeting loan service" at DWP (https://github.com/dwp/design-system/issues/404)

e.g.

Current Screens:

[Demotive]

On 111 we've done a decent amount of thinking around this - very broadly follows the above. We do have an interesting distinction around location address versus home address.

This is mostly a note to self to loop back on this.

[TJFDM]

Summary Care Record Application (SCRa) Note that we're not asking users for their address. Our users are clinicians and NHS admin staff, so they are recording addresses of patients. We 'inherited' address fields from SCRa that looked like this: Issues that we believed would come up were:

• What is the difference between house name & number
• What if someone has an house name and street
• Do users understand that they only HAVE to fill in one of those fields
• What does locality mean
• What does the 'Address and Postcode lookup do

As a starting point, we took what was there and fit it into the NHS.UK style format - which fit in with the rest of the service. This looked like: Through a few rounds of testing, we have the following feedback/observations:

• Users consistently entered house number and street in the first box 'House name' - regardless of field name and hint text. Users told us this was due to just 'being used' to starting an address with line 1 (regardless of whether a house has a name or number)
• Locality wasn't a term people were used to, although they could generally guess what went in the box, due to the general 'line 1/2/3'
• Renaming of the 'address lookup' function worked well

Due to time restraints, we decided that we needed to change out the house name/number fields as a priority. After some reading up, we decided to go with the format that is suggested by GOV.UK here - with some tweaks to allow people to do type ahead on County We've yet to test this but our assumption is that it will resolve our main issues found above but this is an MVP scenario and we're definitely open to evolving.

[sarawilcox]

See also Ask users for their postcode #250

[emma-nhs-vol]

We’ve used an address lookup to allow volunteers to add their address when registering for an opportunity on NHS Volunteering. We looked at services such as Health Start on how to do this:

Notable, we originally had a ‘Continue’ button to submit their query and move onto the results in the next screen. However, we found that some users said they weren’t sure what would happen upon clicking the button. They understood the aim of the journey better once they had clicked the ‘Continue’ button and saw their results on the next page. As a result, we changed the button text to ‘Find address’ with the aim of making this step clearer to them.

Throughout our research, we found that most users had experienced similar means of inputting their address in other services and/or other websites. However, nearly half expected to only input their postcode and have options appear for them automatically (as in, without selecting to go to the next page), based on their postcode entry.

[sarawilcox]

NHS England Slack conversation yesterday about improving UK address entry flow: https://nhsuk.slack.com/archives/C0J62HNKX/p1705502336419679.