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

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
• Flattening outcomes
• Refactoring existing Smart Answers
• Adding content-ids to Smart Answers
• Creating a new Smart Answer
• Archiving a Smart Answer
• Retiring a Smart Answer
• Updating worldwide fixture data

Smart Answers app development

• Development workflow
• Common errors you might run into during development
• Continuous integration
• Testing
• Regression tests
• Issues and Todo

Changes to the landing page

As well as following the development workflow to make changes, they also need to be sent to the content store for them to be rendered on the page. The rake task publishing_api:publish needs to be run once you have deployed your changes in each environment and can be done in Jenkins.

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