3. An alpha to understand
what a common pattern for
housing repairs would look
like
4. If I need a repair in my home (or in a
communal area), I can easily and
confidently find information about how
to resolve my issue, request and book
a repair and understand what will
happen, and by when.
Vision: residents
5. If a resident needs a repair in their
home (or in a communal area), the
correct diagnosis can be easily made
so that the right people with the right
tools can fix the problem in the right
timescale.
Vision: organisations
21. ● We can use a postcode/address to
determine eligibility
● We can identify and retrieve prior
reports
● We’re capturing enough information to
establish a diagnosis
● It’s technically possible to build this
39. People were put off by
this list of emergencies.
Some people didn’t
realise this was a list of
emergencies at all so
they ended up in the
wrong journey
40. Emergency, priority and escalations
mean something very specific to the
council but not to residents.
41. People had a consistently positive
experience with the ‘more details’
page
42. People had a
consistently positive
experience with the
‘more details’ page
but it needs more
structure
43. People struggled with “Have you
reported this problem before?”
because it’s not a simple yes/no
answer for residents
44. I have had this problem
before but it has recurred.
I have told the council about
this. I’m following up because
...
This is the first time this has
happened and I haven’t told
the council yet.
45. So we need to support these options
in an online service and across other
channels.
It may also mean that you start with
‘new repairs’ only
46. Damp, mould, leak, drip .. can mean
different things to people without
adding the complexity of diagnosis.
47. It is challenging for people to
select the
one right option
because they use a different
language, have a problem
that might involve multiple
options on here.
Also, are we asking for the
cause or the effect?
48. The shower leaks all over my
floor and then it comes into
my kitchen cupboards
“
49. We can help people describe it using
a set of standardised questions and
images.
AlexBest practice for providing services that meet user needs
Does not require uniformity
Does not mean a single system that all councils will use
Some councils could adopt all or part of a pattern. Maybe they gave a digital development team
Existing suppliers could also adopt the pattern. That too would be a good result/.
Here’s an example
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language!
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We also identified lots of questions through this process, which we’ll go through later
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Gov uk
Mix of property types
Existing experience with leaks, damp, mould, water issue
That will determine how they will interact with an online service, what they expect and how open they are to self-help.
impatient and fast
meticulous and slow
Impatient and fast
These types of people just want to tell the council what the problem is and can get irritated with ‘elimination-type’ steps in the journey. They are also more likely to be reluctant to embrace new online tools and get annoyed with changes on how they’re used to doing things. They pay a lot less attention to the context (words) and just click through to get to the end so they are more likely to miss information and select the ‘wrong thing’.
meticulous and slow
These kinds of people take their time to really inspect the content and options available to them. This is because they have had a previous negative experience so they make sure they do what the council needs them before they report it and also because English is not their first language so they’re worried they might misunderstand something.
Another way to think about how their existing experience impacts their behaviour might be confident because they’ve lived in the property for longer and know it well and they have experience dealing with quite a few different repairs. As opposed to moving into their first council housing property recently.
So the kinds of things we need to remember when designing is ..
For example,,,
We know this from discovery
"It was just a small problem with the bathroom but when I called up they had no record of my report"
We spent some time together analysing our sessions and noting some ideas. I’ll talk you through some of the bigger findings ...
So i sadi earlier that people could report a variety damp, leak and mould related problems but in some cases people ended up being asked to call because it might be an emergency or felt it took too long.
The main reason for this is that people expect to quite quickly be able to describe what the problem is as well as being the kinds of users who don’t take the time to read through things unless they immediately see an option that matches the exact language they use or looks exactly the same as they’ve seen before.
In line with what we heard from call centre agents the natural flow of a conversation is for the person to describe what’s going on in their own words and then get follow up questions. This is probably the most important thing to remember going forward. We will need to strike balance between asking enough questions to get the information you need to make a decision confidently and not overloading the user with many steps in the journey pushing them to call instead.
A related challenge to that elimination style journey was presenting users with a list of emergencies early on.
For them, the problem is priority to them. That might be because it is a true emergency, or they are just fed up with being stuck in the process or not getting the outcome they’re looking for. So we need to figure out how to help users go down the right route and possibly splitting the emergencies off the main journey.
This ‘reverse’ way of naturally thinking and talking about repairs is largely the reason why people had a consistently positive experience with the ‘more details page’ in all sessions.
Offering more structure to the input fields (instead of one open text field).
Some people didn’t read the bullet points at all. And people weren’t quite sure what/ how much or little to put in the text field. So we could turn bullet points in text fields and also ask people if they’ve done anything about if others are affected etc. Those with English not their first language were conscious about typing and spelling (although they said they could just take their time to google what they need and get someone else to check it before they send it)
Allowing to include more than one image and help people give useful images (like making sure there’s one more close up and another one taken by stepping back so that surrounding areas are visible. We also had someone who drew the location of the problem which might be useful to someone evaluating an enquiry)
I have had this problem before but it has recurred.
I have told the council about this. I’m following up because ...
This is the first time this has happened and I haven’t told the council yet.
I haven’t heard back or I’m not sure what’s going on. [and it might be an emergency now]
We understand it as this specific problem being logged while users might see it as:
There is a wet patch on my wall or ceiling
Damp and rot
So ...
Understanding how customer service agents/planners and tradespeople differentiate between the different underlying reasons why problems are not fixed on the first attempt
Understanding how customer service agents/planners and tradespeople differentiate between the different underlying reasons why problems are not fixed on the first attempt