User Story:

As a case worker in a CoC agency, I want to upload client documents and files so that they'll be visible to the care team wherever they're needed in Clarity.

Priority: Level 2.5 (Impacts entire community; a system/process allows us to accomplish our goals but it is time-consuming and burdensome)

Description & Rationale:

Clarity has two sections under a client's Files tab (https://oahu.clarityhs.com/clients/{{clientID}}/file)—Client Files and Client Forms—and as currently implemented they are terribly confusing for end users. The platform affords no way for admins to prevent the mistakes that the UI design leads to, which are costly to address for the HMIS team as well as its users.

The platform designers' intention is that only the scanned forms generated by Clarity's Client Form Template belong in the Client Forms section of the Files tab. Everything else—including every last form not generated by Clarity's templating system!—is intended to go under Client Files.

What we observe in our production instance is that clients bypass the template selector under "Add Form" by selecting "Upload scanned version of form." By doing so, the system permits uploads of any file (up to a certain size limit).

Thus, our users have been uploading anything and everything that resembles a form to the Client Forms section. Sometimes, they upload things that aren't even forms at all.

We can't blame them: when a user sees two sections, one marked "Forms," and another marked "Files," it's obvious to them where Forms are supposed to go. Unfortunately, that conclusion is not the intent of the UI design. Given no warning or other indication of why this is wrong, it's totally misleading for the user.

The problem with this is that it obscures the file uploads from people who need to see them, because uploading under Client Forms does not allow for selection of a category and predefined name the way the Client Files uploader does. Thus, they don't appear in places throughout the platform where the Client Files would.

My HMIS team just lost more than a day to this issue. We spent that time running a Look to find who had made uploads to the Client Forms section, emailing them all an explanation of why that's actually not where they're supposed to go, and working with them to get their uploads moved to the Client Files section.

We hoped to find a way to disable the Client Forms feature since we can live without them until they're more fully-featured, but we don't see a way to disable this feature completely.

We believe a simple, viable solution would be to disable uploads to Client Forms when one of the Clarity-generated templates is not selected. The Client Forms section should probably be renamed to e.g. "Clarity Forms" or similar to prevent confusion. Failing that, the option to disable Client Forms altogether would ameliorate this issue. Prominent warnings about what's not supposed to go in Client Forms could also help users from making this "error."

Alternatively, presenting a selection of a category and predefined name when a user selects "Upload scanned version," or redirecting them to the Files uploader, would remedy this.

On a call with Josh B. from BitFocus this week, he mentioned that this has been a pain point for at least a few other teams. We expect this will continue to be a problem until BitFocus intervenes with a solution, regardless of our effort to explain it to our users.