SeeClickFix Android App Update Leverages Transparency To Create Efficiency

Transparency is at the heart of the open government, open data, open office, open source and other open movements. But transparency for its own sake isn’t enough because it lacks real world implications and tangible value for the end user. Transparency must be leveraged to spread the word, shift behavior, educate, and create efficiency. Only then does it becomes an invaluable tool for societal change.

This week, SeeClickFix launched a major overhaul to the SeeClickFix Android Mobile App, and with it an iterative feature improvement that leverages the transparent nature of the SeeClickFix platform to create real change.

Let me explain:

The Android update has a number of stylistic, stability and usability features that will substantially improve the civic user experience. Those things are awesome and will delight the user, but the thing that excites me the most as a citizen is the duplicate issue reporting feature. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you spot a mattress in your park. You pull out the SeeClickFix Android App and Report an issue. You snap a photo of the mattress and your location is posted to the app. A set of available request categories are returned based on that location and you select the request category, “Illegal Dumping.” In the new Android App, if the same issue type has already been reported at the same location, you will be presented with those issues. When that happens, you can follow one of those issues as opposed to report a new one.

Here are the three benefits of this feature:

1. Duplicate issue detection saves time in reporting
2. Duplicate issue detection saves officials time in responding on multiple issues 1–1. Now they can respond to you and the other users who are following the existing issue 1 to many.
3. Duplicate issue detection is just another way that reporting illegal dumping and other neighborhood challenges can connect you to like-minded neighbors who care about your neighborhood.

Example of nearby potholes already reported by other neighbors as shown in the reporting flow.

This feature would not be possible without our friend transparency.

Here’s a brief history behind the duplicate issues detection feature for those unfamiliar with SCF (Really? Get familiar.): In all SeeClickFix interfaces a user can see existing issues that their neighbors or city officials have documented. If you want to be included in follow-up notifications and resolution on the issue you can vote or follow the issue. This concept of transparently documenting an issue has brought empathy, civic education and accountability to service request management.

Until this Android update, a user had to look at the issues view first before reporting a new issue to make sure they were not duplicating another citizen’s’ effort which in turn could create more work for the city’s communications team. Many citizens would take this extra step but admittedly many still did not — myself included. That left the responsibility in our product team’s hands to integrate previously documented issues into the reporting flow where appropriate. We had already implemented a similar feature this earlier in the Summer with the release of the call taker interface for City Officials, so the team was able to leverage the API’s that we had developed for that interface in the Android App.

tl dr:

While Android users make up a smaller portion of the SeeClickFix user base we are seeing a rise in the popularity of the platform by the SeeClickFix community. In 2010 the SCF Android app was 17.7% of Mobile App Reports. Today Android is 31.8% of Mobile App Reports.

At a small company the challenge of prioritization is harder when the multiple interfaces you develop for have two major users types: citizens and officials. Our Android app definitely got the short end of the stick in the product development process as it was overshadowed by the work we were doing to build out tools for city officials to manage communication and workflow. Check out the recent launch of SeeClickFix Work as example.

As of this week we have answered the call of SeeClickFix Android users to make substantial design, stability and feature improvements to the app that connects them to their neighbors and City Hall. We hope you like it and will share it with your neighbors. And if you really love it we hope you’ll rate it in the Play Store.

Below is a quick video That Caroline Smith and Margaret Lee produced to highlight the excellent product and engineering of Joshua Wyrtzen + James Smith. A special shoutout goes to the folks at A100 who helped James hone his programming chops.

Download the app here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.seeclickfix.ma.android&hl=en