What's new in Data Upload Design Kit release 2
The Data Upload Design Kit is a powerful tool for service designers working within Government who need to streamline bulk data uploads in GOV.UK services. It is a free tool that takes away the pain often involved in gathering data in bulk and it works with the GOV.UK Prototype Kit.
Since we first announced its release last November (see Collect data for your GOV.UK service in minutes using our Data Upload Design Kit), we have been working hard on various updates to the tool. We are really excited to tell you about these, however, first we’d like to thank everyone who has tried the Kit out and given us feedback! This has really helped to shape the development of the tool and these latest updates. We'd love to keep hearing from you about what works for your services – and what doesn't, so that we can continue to improve the tool, making it as useful as possible for everyone.
In this release there are 4 main updates:
Sheet selection previews
The Data Upload Design Kit (The Kit) enables users to upload a spreadsheet and to select which sheet within a multi-sheet workbook to upload data from. This is a key step in the data upload process. Our Kit’s special sheet selector will now show your users a preview of the sheet that they are selecting, so that they don't have to remember sheet names or switch back to their spreadsheet to check. Neat!
Automatic data validation
The Kit can now automatically validate uploaded data and present users with helpful messages when it doesn't meet expectations. We’ve done this to make it as easy as possible for users to get their data into any system.
We support a limited number of types and marking fields as required or optional and use this to automatically check uploaded data. The Kit also ensures that when users select the columns in their sheet, they include all of the fields necessary for your service.
Accessibility improvements for components
A key feature of the Data Upload Design Kit, is that once you upload your data, you can preview it in table view straight away. Given this is such an important feature, we have been working to improve this even further for you.
We've done a deep dive on table accessibility so that you don't have to! We've improved the design and markup of our components to ensure they comply with WCAG 2.1 AA. This has included adding more ARIA attributes to table cells that are selected, and fixing tab ordering so that keyboard users can tab into and out of tables more easily.
Faster installation with easy unboxing
To get started with the Data Upload Design Kit, you’ll need to install it as a plugin to the GOV.UK Prototype Kit.
We have made key improvements to the installation process so that there is no longer any need edit JSON files. The Kit is now ready to use in your service automatically – all you need to do is say what data you want to collect. For that job we've added a GOV.UK-style web interface to add and remove fields which you can access from within your own service.
What’s next?
We hope that these updates make The Kit easier to use and look forward to hearing any feedback you may have on these changes. To see the full release notes go to Github.
If you haven’t tried it already and want to give it a go visit: Data Upload Design Kit.
There is an ongoing roadmap of development for the Data Upload Design Kit. We are continuing to try and improve it each day and to solve the difficult challenge faced when trying to upload data in bulk. We'd love to hear from you if you have any questions or thoughts to share with us.
Watch our recent webinar that we did for Services Week: A thousand things at once: Bulk transactions and data collection in digital services and explore our blogs which tell you more about why we’ve created this tool: