Smart Answers

Smart answers are a great tool for content designers to present complex information in a quick and simple way. Defining what they are – decision trees? calculators? tools? is immaterial – what they do is provide a reusable technical framework to build a quick and simple answer to a complex question.

Read more in Lisa Scott's GDS blog post.

Screenshots

Live examples

• Look up Meursing code
• Maternity and paternity calculator for employers
• Towing: licence and age requirements

Nomenclature

• Smart Answer: The flow, questions and outcomes.

• Flow: Defines the questions, outcomes and the rules for navigating between them.

• Landing page: Contains a description of the Smart Answer and the "Start now" button that leads to the first question.

• Question page: Contains an individual question that's asked in order to help arrive at at an outcome.

• Outcome page: Contains the result of the Smart Answer based on responses to individual questions.

Technical documentation

This is a Ruby on Rails application that contains:

• A Rails application to serve Smart Answers
• A DSL for creating Smart Answers
• The Smart Answers that appear on GOV.UK

NOTE. This application doesn't use a database and as such it does not include the ActiveRecord Railtie in application.rb.

Dependencies

• alphagov/static: provides static assets (JS/CSS) and the GOV.UK templates.
• alphagov/imminence: provides post code lookup
• alphagov/whitehall: provides country lookup; and information about high commisions and embassies
• nodejs/node: provides JS runtime for precompiling assets for deployment

Running the application

See:

• Developing with the GDS development VM
• Developing without the GDS development VM

Running the test suite

$ bundle exec rake

Smart Answers

• File structure
• Flow definition
• Question types
• Next node rules
• Storing data
• ERB templates
  • Landing page template
  • Question templates
  • Outcome templates

Smart Answer flow development

• Development principles
• Deploying changes for Factcheck
• Merging pull requests from the content team
• Refactoring existing Smart Answers
• Adding content-ids to Smart Answers
• Creating a new Smart Answer
• Archiving a Smart Answer
• Updating worldwide fixture data

Smart Answers app development

• Development workflow
• Common errors you might run into during development
• Environments
• Continuous integration
• Describing pull requests
• Deploying
• Handling exceptions with Errbit
• Rubocop
• Testing
• New-style Testing
• Issues and Todo

Debugging

• Custom Google Analytics accounts and Tracking IDs
• Viewing landing pages and outcomes as Govspeak
• Viewing state of a Smart Answer
• Visualising flows

Registering on GOV.UK

• bundle exec rake publishing_api:publish will send smart answers to the publishing-api.

Search indexing

Content is now indexed automatically via the publishing API

Licence

MIT License