A New Fully Online Registration Process for NCS

Back then we said:

NCS is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that helps young people build skills for work and life, while taking on new challenges and meeting new friends. Year 11 and 12 students, and 15 to 17 year olds not in education, can develop the tools and belief to unlock their potential and make a positive impact in their communities.

We were approached in early 2015 to make it even easier for more people to take part by extending their signup process online, with full payments integration. Key to this we felt was to ensure the form felt professional and secure while retaining the unique, vibrant and youth-orientated branding that the NCS uses to great effect. A challenge as anyone who has filled in extensive online forms can imagine!

The result is a clear, approachable form broken down into manageable sections with clear indications of how far users have left to go. At all stages we sought to reduce the stress of filling out information, including a clever algorithm that returns a list of the available courses calculated from an address, school and date of birth. To further improve usability we included an easily viewable dynamic calendar that shows the days a course will run.

With security ever present on our minds, we made every effort possible to ensure that users' data is kept under lock and key. The more visible aspects include a valid SSL certificate and automatic redirection to a secure URL. This helps to prevent a 'man-in-the-middle' attack, whereby an attacker intercepts the data sent from your computer to the NCS database. Under the hood, a far more extensive measure is the complete encryption of all data stored by the system using a US Security Agencies approved encryption method.

Having only launched within the past 24 hours, we have already seen several new registrations and are looking forward to seeing how users will make use of this new process going forward.