DIY.mySociety.org
From the monthly archives: July 2012
“Clock of the long now (prototype)” by piglicker (CC-BY-NC-ND-licensed from Flickr)
One of the democratic software tools mySociety has built is an online petitions tool for use by governments. We built the first version for the British Prime Minister’s office, and now it is used by a variety of British local governments.
When a user wants to make a new petition, they fill in a web form, containing the petition details.
During this process, a user must choose when they want their petition to end.
The question we are exploring today is this: what’s the best way to ask for that information?
From a developer’s point of view, the end of a petition is obviously a date. This is because the petition software really needs to test whether or not today’s date comes after the petition’s end-date. So an easy — and accessible — way to ask for this data would be as a date input, which could even helpfully trigger a calendar pop-up menu or similar widget.
But we don’t do it like that, for a couple of reasons, both of which you might miss if you were to build this from scratch. Instead, we ask:
For how long would you like your petition to accept signatures? (e.g., “1 month”; maximum 1 year)
That’s not a date input. But why?
The first reason is that the user is thinking about running a petition as something they plan to do for a period of time. Put simply, if you’re asked about your next holiday, you’ll probably imagine what you’ll be doing (“I’m going to spend two weeks lying on the beach”) rather than the end of it (“I’m going to stop lying on the beach on the 25th of August”).
In terms of interface design, this means that users will tend to think about how long something lasts differently than from how a computer or a coder will tend to think about it. The general rule is: even for something as simple as this little web form, if it’s possible to create an interface that matches the way that a user thinks about the world, then it will be less confusing for them than one that does not. Usually this means the system has to be a bit more complicated to program, in order to convert what the user types to what the computer needs.
The second reason that we ask for a duration, not a date, is that in the case of the petition, the user doesn’t actually know when their petition is going to start. Although they’re entering it into the website right now, there will nearly always be a delay before the government approves it. So most of the time, by asking for a duration, we’re avoiding raising this issue at all, and the user simply says what they mean, and it works. A petition with a duration of “3 months” will run for three months, once it goes live. A date wouldn’t survive an unspecified delay like that.
So, we ask for a duration and parse the result to turn it into a date when it goes live… but there’s an extra twist. What if the user really does know the date their petition must end? Maybe it’s a petition about closing the main road for a New Year’s Party, and it’s got to be discussed at the council meeting that’s being held on the 5th of December. Well — OK! If the user puts a date into the duration field, even though we didn’t ask for a date… we accept it. We can do some validation to make sure it’s a sensible date, of course, but basically if someone does puts a date in there, then that’s fine too.
What we hope this has shown you is that even something as simple as asking a user for an end date can be done easily (just use a date input there) or thoughtfully. The system wouldn’t break if we did it the other way. But making things as convenient as this means that we are allowing users to focus on the thing we’re trying to let them do, instead of drawing attention to how we are making them do it.
Simple things are the most easily overlooked. Two examples: a magician taking a wand out of his pocket (see? so simple that maybe you’ve never thought about why it wasn’t on the table at the start), or the home page on www.fixmystreet.com.
The first thing FixMyStreet asks for is a location. That’s so simple most people don’t think about it; but it doesn’t need to be that way. In fact, a lot of services like this would begin with a login form (“who are you?”) or a problem form (“what’s the problem you want to report?”). Well, we do it this way because we’ve learned from years of experience, experiment and, yes, mistakes.
We start off by giving you, the user, an easy problem (“where are you?”) that doesn’t offer any barrier to entry. Obviously, we’re very generous as to how you can describe that location (although that’s a different topic for another blog post). The point is we’re not asking for accuracy, since as soon as we have the location we will show you a map, on which you can almost literally pinpoint the position of your problem (for example, a pothole). Pretty much everyone can get through that first stage — and this is important if we want people to use the service.
How important? Well, we know that when building a site like FixMyStreet, it’s easy to forget that nobody in the world really needs to report a pothole. They want to, certainly, but they don’t need to. If we make it hard for them, if we make it annoying, or difficult, or intrusive, then they’ll simply give up. Not only does that pothole not get reported, but those users probably won’t bother to try to use FixMyStreet ever again.
So, before you know it, by keeping it simple at the start, we’ve got your journey under way — you’re “in”, the site’s already helping you. It’s showing you a map (a pretty map, actually) of where your problem is. Of course we’ve made it as easy as possible for you to use that map (and, yes, we also let you skip it if for some reason a map doesn’t help you). You see other problems, already reported (maybe you’ll notice that your pothole is already there — and we haven’t wasted any of your time making you tell us about it, even though you probably didn’t realise we intended right from the start to show you other people’s problems before you reported your own). Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we now know which jurisdictions are responsible for the specific area, so the drop-down menu of categories you’re about to be invited to pick from will already be relevant for the council departments (for example) that your report will be going to.
And note that we still haven’t asked you who you are. We do need to know — we send your name and contact details to the council as part of your report — but you didn’t come to FixMyStreet to tell us who you are, you came first and foremost to report the problem. So we focus on the reporting, and when that is all done then, finally, we can do the identity checks.
Of course there’s a lot more to it than this, and it’s not just civic sites like ours that use such techniques (most modern commerce sites have realised the value of making it very easy to take your order before any other processing; many governmental websites have not). But we wanted to show you that if you want to build sites that people use, you should be as clever as a magician, and the secret to that is often keeping it simple — deceptively simple — on the outside.
We’ve mentioned Components before on this blog – they’re modules which you can slot into your website, and which should save you a lot of time and effort. Today, we’re pleased to announce that a fundamental Component is ready for use – MapIt Global.
This Component will match geographical points to administrative areas anywhere in the world. So for example, you can use it on sites like FixMyStreet, where we ask the user for a zipcode/postcode, and then automatically knows which council to send their report to.
mySociety’s Director Tom has written an in-depth blog post about MapIt Global. You’ll want to read it if you’re thinking of building a site or app for reporting street faults, for contacting elected representatives, for parliamentary monitoring… or just maybe you have ideas for a type of website that we haven’t even thought of. We look forward to seeing how MapIt Global will be used.
Questions? Thoughts? We’d love to hear them, either on this post or on Tom’s.
