Back in the era when I was involved in the content and user exerience design and development of a local government website, one of the things I heard said most often which irritated me the most was the confident assertion that 'customers aren't interested in [that], they're only interested in [this]'. This assertion was never backed up with any objective qualitative user research, of course, at best the assertion was only ever accompanied by page access statistics showing only x% of users had accessed the page about [that] in the last x months. You know those statistics I'm talking about - the ones which if we used them blindly we'd be getting rid of almost the entirety of the site's content and functionality bar about 20 pages and forms.
Essentially it's been arguing against that kind of mentality that most of my writing here and on its predecessor blog sites has been the last 10 years or so.
This morning on Threads I saw this post:
So, to be clear I'm not here writing about the poor accessibility of this station, or indeed how long it's going to take to refurbish a lift. I've no idea how long it should take to refurbish a lift.
And that's what my point here is.
Most of us won't have the faintest idea of whether six months is a reasonable timescale to refurbish a lift, what goes in to the process of refurbishing a lift, or indeed why there might be a need to shut the lift down long before anybody appears to be doing any work on the lift. Or, indeed, fill a pothole, collect a missed bin collection, restore a seaside pier, fix a swimming pool, etc
So what most of us do is we go on Threads / X / Facebook / BlueSky / Mastodon to say how rubbish the council is (or TfL, or the Community Leisure Trust, or whatever) for taking six months just to fix a damn lift.
Instead, if maybe there was a link on that poster to a page on the website giving more details as to what's going on and why it's going to take longer than the person on the Birkdale Omnibus thinks it should take - including, indeed, information about the need to source a special part from Ukraine and how it's been identified that the lift could fail catastrophically at any moment which is why it's been closed now rather than when the part arrives, etc - then the user instead of jumping to the social internet to castigate us might instead jump to the social internet to say 'oh, just in case anybody doesn't know, the lift is out of action for this long for this reason, here's the alternative'. By respecting our users, we have the opportunity to turn a critic into somebody who's helping us out with our communications.