Private guided pathway
Status: Reference implementation — project approved
- Purpose
- Help someone move from an uncertain situation to a small, prioritised set of safer routes without asking for their story or identity.
- When to use
- When a visitor recognises that something may be wrong but does not yet know which issue, right, guide or support route fits.
- When not to use
- Do not collect names, contact details, locations, narrative text, uploads or unnecessary identifying details. Do not diagnose, score danger or promise an outcome.
- Anatomy
- Immediate-help interruption before questions
- Six short, broad-choice steps
- Visible progress with back and edit controls
- Prioritised first step, safety notes and existing site routes
- Clear state, print warning and no answer-specific prefetch
- Variants
- Self, another adult, child, older woman, institution and unsure; immediate danger interrupts the normal sequence.
- Content rules
- Use recognition language, not interrogation. Every result preserves agency, says the harm is not the person's fault and distinguishes general information from case-specific legal advice.
- Example
- I am supporting a child → danger is not immediate → unsafe touch and online contact → understand what this is → child help, safe adult support and relevant guidance first.
- Child considerations
- Show child help before disclosure prompts. Never require a child to write or retell what happened.
- Older-user considerations
- Prioritise phone and in-person support, financial agency, disability access and the older woman's own decisions.
- Accessibility behaviour
- Use native radio buttons and checkboxes, semantic fieldsets, step-heading focus, inline errors, keyboard-operable editing, 44px targets and a useful no-JavaScript route.
- Safety risks
- Keep answers only in current React memory; never place them in storage, cookies, analytics, URLs, network requests or server logs. Reset on quick exit, page leave and browser-history restoration.
- Responsive behaviour
- One reading column and full-width choices on small screens; no horizontal step rail, fixed-height panel or sticky action bar.
- Code
- pathways/guided-situation-pathway, lib/pathways/guided and the pure guided-engine. Safety precedence is immediate danger, monitored-device safety, child safeguarding, older-woman access, supporter guidance, then the visitor's first goal. Age safeguards enter each section before result caps. Result links disable prefetch because destinations can reveal inferred choices; the engine has a complete goal, precedence, privacy-state and child-overlay test matrix
- Figma component
- Research evidence
- Test comprehension, perceived privacy, keyboard and screen-reader order, child safeguarding, older-woman access and whether first steps feel achievable.
- Change history
- v1.1 — private in-memory pathway added to the canonical situations page, with a deterministic tested ranking engine and protected child and older-woman overlays.