Not sure what to tell users? Find out what they want to know…
My name is James Green and I’m a Service Designer at Bath & North East Somerset Council. I’m leading a project to make some improvements to our issue reporting system, Fix My Street (FMS for short). It gives citizens a way to tell the council about problems with the roads, pavements, and parks. They can make reports online and even see previously reported issues. Users will also see updates to reports from the Council. These automatic updates are made when something significant changes. They are a useful way to keep citizens up to date with how we’re addressing reports.
We rolled out FMS in April 2018. Now, with over a year of insight to draw from, we’re making some improvements. When reporting an issue online the first thing a user sees is a map showing all reported issues in their area. More important perhaps, a user can see how the Council has responded to these reports. This level of transparency was a new and welcome change for citizens in B&NES. Yet we knew there was room for improvement.
Most feedback from people using FMS relates to our updates. The systematic provision of updates, using templates in FMS, is very powerful. It means we can give users an update automatically when something important changes. But users are telling us they still aren’t getting the information they really want.
So, what do users want to know from the council after they’ve reported a problem? We started off by asking them. A short online survey, presented to our online users, asked two simple questions; How interested are you in updates, and what do you need to know? As a first tentative toe dipped into the user pool we wanted to keep things simple. Users could tell us what they wanted to know in as much or as little detail as they wanted, and the feedback we got was incredibly valuable.
Next, we spoke to the people who know our citizens best (apart from the citizens themselves); our contact centre. Call agents take hundreds of reports on behalf of callers, as well as providing them with updates. They have a pretty good idea of what users want to know, because they speak to them every day.
We also explored what people were telling us through Fix My Street itself. We have over a years worth of reports and follow up comments from users. We were able to use the data to answer our questions; What are users reporting? What are they telling us? What do they want to know? It’s not just the data, but the context as well that gives us an insight. This is invaluable for increasing our understanding about how to update our citizens. It can help us avoid language that only makes sense to those who work in a Local Authority. At the same time making sure we don’t dumb things down so much that the message is lost. It’s a tricky balancing act, especially when talking to a very diverse audience.
In a couple of weeks the FMS project team will sit down with various services across the council and re-write our responses to reports. Everything we agree will be based on the knowledge we’ve gained over the last 6 weeks. We may not be able to answer everyone’s questions, but what we do tell our users will be based on what they want to know.
