Housing repairs revisited
How we worked with Camden Council to improve their online housing repairs service
Last year, we started a 10-week mixed discovery/alpha phase with Camden Council, to explore how we might better support Camden residents to report their housing repairs online.
I first wrote about this work in Week 26 of Designed and Made.
The project wrapped up in December. Here’s an update on how it went.
Users first!
In our alpha, we focused on two evidenced problems for Camden residents, as identified in our discovery work.
A ‘sticky’ front end
Camden residents must create a Camden Account to report a repair online, and provide their rental reference number and date of birth.
In our user testing, most residents forgot their account password or confused their password with another one (such as their Camden library password). When this happened, their first response was to phone the council to report the repair instead.
None of the residents we tested with had their rental reference number to hand, and those who reported repairs for others (their family or friends) were unlikely to have access to a rental reference number at all.
In a survey of 400+ Camden residents, more than 10% said they had not reported a repair online because of difficulties logging into their account.
‘Dead-end’ journeys
There are hundreds of possible repair types, from leaky taps to broken windows.
In testing, residents struggled to find their repair type from those listed in the online repairs form.
One resident had mould in their bathroom, but could only report a repair to bathroom equipment, windows, flooring or electricals in the form. This led them to leave the form and phone instead.
In another case, a resident found the right repair type online but was redirected by the form to phone the council (some repair types, such as potential emergencies, can not be reported online).
Residents who had Covid in their household were also redirected to the phone service.
This frustrated users, because they had spent time trying to log their repair online, only to find out that they couldn’t over the internet.
Testing ideas
We created a new prototype for reporting housing repairs online, to test solutions to these problems.
Handling the sticky front-end
We decided to test a prototype that removed the need to log in to a Camden account, or to provide a rental reference number and date of birth. Residents instead provided their name and address only to identify themselves.
Residents responded well to this: no users ended their journey because it was too difficult to identify themselves.
Making the form more ‘forgiving’
We added a ‘I’m not sure/ Something else’ option for when residents were selecting their repair type.
This enabled all residents to continue with their report, even if they were unable to identify their repair issue from the options provided.
Moving triage questions forward
We added questions to the start of the form, to redirect those with emergency repairs, or with Covid in the household.
These pages were successful in redirecting those who could not report their repair, reducing frustration.
However, we observed some residents selecting their repair as an emergency when it was not.
Residents thought an emergency repair would be attended to more quickly, or were worried their repair might become an emergency if it was not attended quickly. This was despite most residents being able to correctly identify an emergency repair when asked what these might be.
Further work is needed to understand how to triage emergency repairs online, to ensure that those with the highest need are attended to first.
What we learned
Nothing beats directly observing users. Without this, we would not have uncovered the key problems users had when reporting a repair online, which informed where our alpha should start. We also wouldn’t have uncovered deeper issues uncovered when testing our prototype.
Input from subject matter experts (SMEs) is crucial. SMEs from Camden Council helped us explore what personal identification was necessary for the service, and how changes to repair type options would impact service delivery. Without this, we may have attempted design options that weren’t viable.
Keeping scope tight helped us deliver at pace. We purposefully focused on one part of the repair journey - reporting and booking a repair - and not later parts, such as repair updates, or cancelling a repair. We also knew that the repair types provided in the current online form may not be quite right, but we didn’t change them in the alpha, because we think this will take a lot of work to get right. We instead focused on what we could realistically achieve well in the time we had.
The learning won’t stop there for Camden, who are planning further work in this area. Work continues to provide a better service experience for Camden residents.