Pull quotes

[beccagorton-1]

What

The DFE are building a training platform to upskill the early years workforce. In this training offer, there is a need for varying types of content, to help keep users engaged with the learning materials. We use pull quotes to highlight key theories and statements from frameworks.

The large blockquote style has a decorative speech mark, an outline and is indented from the body text. We use this for quotes that are a couple of sentences long.

The short quote is an adaptation of the inset text component, and is used for single sentence quotes.

Why

Explain why you think this should be added to the GOV.UK Design System. For other services that may be similar to ours in the future, pull quotes might be useful for training materials, engaging content, research articles, or news articles.

• What evidence do you have that it's needed by multiple services across government? Ofsted, Ofqual and DFE all have research and news articles where these components could be used. They have also been useful in helping break up lengthy training materials to help keep users engaged with the content.

• What evidence do you have that it meets the needs of the users of those services? We have tested longer pages with different content styles to test if users could read through and not become distracted by too many different styles of content. Users have noted that having the quotes are useful for their learning and are more visually appealing compared to an older style of pull quote that we were using previously.

[vickytnz]

My question with this would be how this related to the proposition of GOV.UK (which therefore relates to the GOV.UK design system). A lot of these examples seem to relate to things that don't go on GOV.UK

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/govuk-proposition/govuk-proposition#what-does-not-go-on-govuk

What does not go on GOV.UK Your content or service must not go on GOV.UK if it:

• is from an organisation that is not part of central government
• advertises or gives commercial advantage to an organisation
• gives advice that a non-governmental organisation is better placed to do
• is party political content
• is for internal work management or better placed on departmental intranets
• is only relevant to devolved administrations
• duplicates other content or services on GOV.UK

I feel like some of these examples would be more appropriate for the standards for campaigns?

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/campaigns-on-gov-uk-standards-and-guidelines

[StephenGill]

I think this is definitely something worth talking about.

Our patterns, guidance and processes tend to focus on some use cases at the expense of others. For example -

• delivering information rather than promoting engagement
• transactional, form-type interactions - rather than other types of interaction
• defining value in terms of individual user needs rather than wider societal benefits
• optimising for one-off use rather than repeat use

Not to say that this is wrong - just that our patterns, guidance and processes emerged to help solve a specific set of problems, aligned to the GOV.UK proposition.

And that different solutions might work better for different use cases.

[laura-biscuits]

Hi - I'm a content designer and I work with @beccagorton-1.

@Vickyynz -the service we are building will sit on an education.gov.uk domain, and is built using the design system as it's a DfE service. It does, however, pass the "does it go on GOV.UK ?" test.

As @stephengill points out - it's just a different type of service to the ones that we usually associate with GOV.UK. It's not a transactional service. It's a non mandatory training course. The course is split into modules that are estimated to take an hour to complete.

We need users to:

• engage with the content
• take the content in
• get to the bottom of the page
• want to read the next page
• recognise the service as being for people like them

These users work in early years education and are used to the colourful and stimulating resources they use with children. The standard design system/GOV.UK quote styles just weren't cutting it.

During our UR sessions we have repeatedly heard from users that they like elements like images, coloured boxes and the pull quotes shown here. They like them because they break up the page and are more visually interesting than plain text.

We've tested the same content without the visually stimulating elements and the pages don't hold user's attention as much as when they do have decoration.

When we've tested these quote styles in particular - users reacted positively to a style that emphasises the quote as something separate and different to the main content.