When you go to the website to report your bins haven't been collected, do you want to see [a] over a screenful of text which at best makes excuses and at worst blames you for it, or [b] just a sentence apologising and promising to make it right?
In this era of user-centred design, after having spent five years fixing the plumbing, it's a shocking fact that there are far too many council websites which adopt a user-unfriendly approach of making citizens jump through hoops to report their collection having been missed. At best the user encounters a passive-aggressive tone in the content, worse they'll experience over a screenful of text which basically says it's probably their fault but grudgingly accepts the user might want to report it anyway, worse still the council makes the user login to report it (how do such councils handle phone reports?), and in the most user-hostile cases I encountered some councils just tell the user to go away and don't even let them report the collection as having been missed, they just tell the citizen they're not going to come back and collect them later so they must bring the rubbish back in or take it to the tip!
This is not acceptable, so I've done a sample mock-up of the kind of missed bin form I want to see as a citizen:
BigTown Council's missed bins report form
I floated it on Facebook and LinkedIn, and as well as adding some additional sample content related to the form itself I made a couple of tweaks based on comments made. This article is to explain my thinking behind what I've done.
The form
First of all, the form itself. Key to the user journey is the unqualified apology. It doesn't matter whether 5%, 50%, or 80% of missed collections are caused by the citizen not putting the correct bin out in time or by somebody's car blocking the street so the wagon couldn't get to your house. Does it hurt us as the council to apologise to the people who are responsible for their own failed collection at the same time as apologising to the people whose collection was missed because of our service failure? We're adults providing a service people are entitled to as of right, we're not children in the playground threatening to go tell teacher. A little humility goes a long way. The second, supplementary, paragraph invites the user to look at the page about bin collections generally, and to check on the map for the collections we already know have been missed.
Then there are just four key questions for the user to answer - what collection was missed, the address it was supposed to be at, the date it was expected, and whether the whole street appears to have been missed.
It's difficult to properly demonstrate on this mock-up, but after the user has entered the address of the collection, I propose that a good missed collections form will then immediately do a look-up to a live system (whether that's the job scheduling system or the CRM system) to then inform the user immediately if we already know the collection has been missed. If we do already know, it tells the user, and importantly gives the user the option to proceed with the report. A relaxed and live-and-let-live person may well conclude there's nothing to be gained by reporting it anyway, but a person who is rather cross is going to be made even more cross if they're told to go away.
Contact details capture is optional. We need to know where the bin was missed from, we don't need to know who is reporting it.
Lastly, the user is asked whether they're just reporting it, or whether they want the report to be treated as a complaint. My next article will go into that in more detail!
About your bin collections
The page about your bin collections, after the introductory paragraph, moves straight to links to a pair of top tasks likely associated with bins - reporting the missed collection, or reporting flytipping. The user really does not need to see all that information before they may be graciously permitted to report their missed collection; the very first paragraph of the Content Principles in my emerging updated Content and UX Strategy is clear:
Respect the user’s basic knowledge and capability
Most people I really do think know what day their binday is, most people I think really do put the correct rubbish in each bin, I really don't think they need to read the information every single time they report a missed collection.
Similarly, I think most people probably know for the most part what goes in what bin; there's a degree to which a list of such might be considered to be padding content, but I think a list of a handful of examples of dos and don'ts doesn't harm anybody, and indeed it's helpful to mention a few examples of things folks might not realise can and can't go in certain bins.
I usually see this content as either long sentences of text, or as long bulleted lists. Personally I find both of those formats difficult to work through for this specific kind of content, which is why I've rendered it as a table. I think it's a valid use of an HTML table, and I think it's a properly accessible use of an HTML table, but I'm content to accept alternative opinion on that.
Describing what can go wrong, note that the tone is still intended to be one of humility, even where the problem of the citizen putting the wrong thing in the wrong bin is outlined. Note that the reason is given why a contaminated bin is a problem rather than us just appearing to be jobsworths, and note the tone of regret that we do from time to time have to take enforcement action against offenders.
Latest missed collections
The purpose of the map is twofold - first of all, the obvious purpose of allowing people to see if we already know about their missed collection, but secondly, and more importantly for me, to be transparent about them.
One of the reasons I've always been irritated about councils describing the people who live here as 'customers' is that when it comes to the basic statutory council services, they're not customers. Customers are people who have a choice about whether or not to purchase the goods on offer; customers have a choice about whether or not to take their business elsewhere. Our residents, however, don't have a choice about whether the standard householder is going to be liable to pay their council tax, and they don't have a choice about whether to pay less council tax in order to subscribe to a competing bin collection service. Our residents have a right to have their bins collected, and most householders have an obligation to pay their council tax. The contract between council and resident is not a voluntary, commercial one, it's a mandatory contract, which is why we should describe them as citizens. And it's why we should be transparent and up front in letting them see how well we are fulfilling our end of the social contract - in this case, showing how well we are performing at collecting the bins.
The map will be populated by a live data source, the system which logs the collection jobs as they are completed or not completed, the system which logs the reports of failed collections that citizens have submitted, and ideally both.
In the example here it's simply a screenshot of some pins on a map, but for real it would obviously be an interactive map, and there would be the option for users to see more detail as appropriate about the nature of any given missed collection. I'm not aware of any data protection concerns about this, but again I'm open to discussion on it.