Trap UK Border Agency & other non-team emails on Contact Us page

[skenaja]

The WhatDoTheyKnow mailbox receives around 3-8 emails a month by UKBA applicants wanting help with their visa issues.

As part of the Contact Us page, before any message gets added, we should add various radio buttons to ask the user what they need help with.

The UKBA page could then redirect to a special support static page.

This could be extended for other common situations where people write to us when they really want to be writing to someone else.

[sebbacon]

Could you expand on this?

• Contact Us page has radio buttons, including "I have a query about by visa application"
• If that is selected, what happens...?

Specifically, I don't follow how this ties in with the UKBA page.

Thanks!

[skenaja]

• The UKBA applicants mistakenly use the Contact Us to write to us instead of to the UKBA
• The Contact Us page 1:
  • [radio1] [I have a query on my immigration / visa status]
  • [radio2] [I have a message for the WhatDoTheyKnow team
  • [radio3] [could be extended to other options]
  • [Next]
• [radio1] redirects to Contact_Us_border_agency_end. This is just a static html page with further advice for UKBA applicants
• [radio2] redirects to a real contact us page, and collects the information on name/email/message. This has a [send] button.

Tom mentioned that http://www.writetothem.com/about-contact does something similar - if you check "Your representative", you get redirected elsewhere.

[tmtmtmtm]

Copying the WriteToThem "who is this message for?" approach seems like a better version than cluttering the interface with explicit references to things like immigration / visa status that will just confuse most people.

We already have a 'last_body' set at this point, so we could display something like:

Who is this message for?

• The site_name team
• last_body
• Other

[zarino]

Using last_body sounds totally magic. Would love to see that in action.

I worry that adding a radio button about visa applications actually legitimises the user in thinking we have anything to do with visa decisions. (Imagine: non native English speaker visits page, quickly scans down, spots what looks like a list of things the contact form can be used for, starts typing, sends message.)

Do the contact form messages intended for the UKBA follow any sort of pattern? Eg: Do they tend to mention the word "visa"? Could we detect that as the user types their message, and pop up a "Did you mean to do this?" message, just like we do for request titles and the "Similar requests" popup message?

[zarino]

We've had lots of really useful feedback on proposed copy for this page, here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W1eP7Xu4QZHsEyIX7yNfslDwKeAhMd1oWqONeI_b4XY/edit

So, thanks to everyone for that. I think I've got enough to get a first iteration of this deployed, then we can see whether it has an effect, and tweak further if required.

@crowbot – I spotted a contact.cy.html.erb file in whatdotheyknow-theme. I'm assuming we'll need someone to translate the English page to Welsh once it's ready?

[zarino]

Pull request here: mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme#323

I'll need some help from a developer (@lizconlan @garethrees @crowbot) to get it finished.

[lizconlan]

@zarino that would be me! I've assigned both of us, erm, because it's a new feature so I can! (and this will be the first time we've used it on purpose rather than by mistake 😀)

[garethrees]

Fixed by mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme#323