Equality monitoring task
This is one of the tasks in the personal information task list.
We ask users to complete questions which cover topics including:
- sex
- gender
- age
- ethnic group
- sexual orientation
- religion
- disability
- socio-economic background, including parents’ employment
This screenshot is of the first page of questions.
The questions are drawn from the government harmonised standards.
In the current service, these questions appear partway through the application form. Research has shown that users find this intrusive.
One participant wondered whether their answers might affect their application, which is not the case.
We think that including equality monitoring in the personal details task list will more clearly separate it from the assessment process.
Since it’s now a task, it can also be completed at a time that suits the user rather than interrupting the flow of the application.
Further considerations for the equality monitoring task
We should:
- improve the content in the task
- look at whether some questions could be removed
- consider what guidance to include, if any
Improving the content in the task
We decided not to include this task in research sessions because:
- it’s very long
- it encourages users to add personal information
- the questions are standardised across government and therefore cannot be changed
As a result we did not prioritise designing this task in the prototype. It needs some work to tidy it up.
A good start would be to use the patterns for equality information in the design system for:
- age
- disability
- ethnic group
- marital or partnership status
- religion
- sex and gender identity
- sexual orientation
Looking at whether some questions could be removed
In research users said that they found the section very long. We’ve heard anecdotally that users tend to select ‘prefer not to say’ more often for the later questions.
It would be worth reviewing which questions are needed by CPS. We may be able to reduce the length of this section without losing essential data.
Considering what guidance to include
The current service has quite a lot of guidance at the start of the equalities questions. Most of it is not so useful at the point where the user is completing the information.
We might consider introducing some guidance, for example a note saying that the data will be anonymised.