Investigate tools to simplify code for branching user journeys

[lfdebrux]

What

Find ways to reduce the amount of code a user needs to write to link from one question to another based on the form input.

Talk to the community to see what existing solutions are out there, spike some ideas of our own, and maybe organise a hack-a-thon.

Test the best ideas with users, and consider shipping something as an 'official' extension.

See #576 (comment) for more detail.

Why

We know that making a branching user journey is a lot harder than it could be, and we think that making it simpler would be a big improvement. This has been an issue we've wanted to address for a while (see 'related work' below).

Who needs to work on this

User researcher, Developer, Tech lead

Who needs to review this

Tech lead, UCD person

Done when

• Research user needs around creating branching user journeys (optional)
• Spike alternative implementations, possibly involving the community
• Test implementations with users
• Investigate shipping as an extension

Related work

A lot of prior work has been on this. Issue #576 links to a couple of technical suggestions, which were ultimately not merged as it was felt more user research was needed. Issue #839 gathered together ideas around improving documentation and examples, some of which have been progressed and some which have not. @natcarey put together a simple demonstration of how an extension could be used to implement a tool, at https://github.com/x-govuk/prototype-navigation-radios/, and there probably are other extensions out there that do the same thing.

We have a little bit of existing research on difficulties with branching gathered together in this doc by @ameliaphil, although there are probably more and better examples on x-gov Slack, for instance this question about routing with checkboxes.