I was walking around a park in Bath the other day, and I came across this notice on a bin:
On the plus side, there’s a URL and a specific reference number for the bin in question.
On the minus side, though, the URL takes you to a landing page for all the site’s reporting forms, so you’ve got to search for the right form; when I found the form it went to what I think is a skinned version of FixMyStreet, where you enter your location and the details of the problem.
I think in the mobile-first 12,025th Year of the Human Era we should be able to be much better at this.
So before I go any further with this, absolutely no shade to Bath and North East Somerset Council here - I just happened to be there when I saw something which gave me an idea for a blog post, and by even having a reference number for the bin they’re doing better than many councils.
The site domain
First of all, the domain for the site. The majority of council website accesses have been via mobile devices for a long time, yet still most councils have overly long domains for their sites. Fine, there’s nothing wrong with keeping the domain which has as much of the name of the council as practical for showing on the DuckDuckGo search results, but in situations where we’re expecting users to type the URL into their phones (because we’re not going to give them a QR code out in the unmonitored arena, are we?) we should be giving them as few characters as possible to have to poke into the keyboard - cov.gov.uk, bhm.gov.uk, wlv.gov.uk, lancs.gov.uk, and in this instance, bnes.gov.uk (and all without the www. in front) should get you to your council website.
(As an aside, an iPhone, and for all I know Android phones as well, if you take a photo with a URL on it will recognise the URL and give you an option to click through straight from the picture in the photos app, but that knowledge many not be universally known)
But let's go further, shall we - the bin has a unique reference number, which is printed on the sign for the bin. The URL on the sign directs the user to the home page for all their report forms.
But why send the user to the reporting home page and make them look for the correct form, when the sign could send the user to the bin problems form?
But wait! The bin has its own unique reference id; what else has a unique reference id? Why, a URL, of course!
A complete asset-specific URL
So why not send the user to bnes.gov.uk/LB1871 (obviously case-insensitive) which will be the Report a problem with a litter bin form, with the reference pre-populated onto the form, and just the one mandatory field of some tickboxes to say what the problem is, and the user can be done with it and carry on to get their ice cream.
Same with any other report form for council assets out on the streetscape - street lighting, traffic lights, benches, whatever - which could be referenced in this way.
Make it so!
I'm not aware of any ubiquitous CMS forms engines which could support such a system (and the easy management of the short URL mapping with something like a .csv file) out of the box, but it should be a fairly easy piece of programming to build such a proof of concept from scratch, therefore a reasonably easy thing to add to the roadmap for an existing system.
So if you happen to be a contributor to an open source CMS platform or the product manager for a proprietary platform, then as always do feel free to take this idea and contact me to let me know if you're running with it!