Improving the user experience for the online complaint form

The Alberta Security Commission’s original vendor couldn't perform the updates the ASC needed to improve their online complaint form and cut down on the number of calls and emails received. Bayleaf’s work, as well as suggestions for improvements to page content, tools, IA, and the form’s stepped process, helped achieve these goals while simultaneously making it mobile-friendly.

Client Name

Alberta Securities Commission

CMS

Services

  • Project Management
  • Business Analysis
  • Information Architecture
  • UX & UI Design
  • Custom Web Application Development & Integration
  • Support, Documentation & Training

Technologies

  • Sitecore Web Forms
  • JSON
  • Information Architecture
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365

Client Needs

Although the ASC had an online complaint form, they found it was under utilized with complaints coming in from calls or emails. Additionally, their ‘Initial Assessment’ form, to help users determine whether they had a valid complaint, could not be linked to a detailed complaint created later. This inability to link complaints resulted in duplicate records and required a high degree of manual processing to reconcile. The ASC needed help giving users the tools to self-determine if their complaint fell within ASC jurisdiction and to driving users to the online form. They also wanted to improve the form’s performance on mobile and increase the visibility of submitting an anonymous complaint.

Our Solutions

Before suggesting solutions, Bayleaf did a full UX review of the existing complaint process to identify issues and areas of improvement. Recommendations included:

  • reducing the prominence of call/email options,
  • removing the ‘Initial Assessment’ form to simplify the process and eliminate duplication and need to link two complaint types
  • improving the form’s structure, pushing introduction and help info to the top and making it mobile friendly
  • feature creating an account, allowing users to manage complaints, while maintaining the option to submit anonymously
  • preventing users from jumping ahead by forcing sequential progression, while allowing them to go back to previously completed steps
  • improve form validation with clear error messages, highlighting all issues rather than just the first one simplifying the registration form and increasing its visibility

IMPROVING USABILITY

The previous process required users to select ‘File a Complaint’ several times before arriving at the form. For example, a user would make their selection from the menu or home page and be taken to a general introduction page with options to:

  1. call or email
  2. complete an initial assessment or
  3. file a detailed complaint

Users typically took the easiest path which was phone, email, or the short initial complaint form. Even if users selected option 3 immediately, they were still directed to a page outside of the form process, being asked to login, create account, or submit anonymously.

Bayleaf’s suggestion to remove the initial assessment, deprioritize phone and email options and fold account creation or anonymous submission into the first step of the complaint process, simplifies user options, and increases engagement.

Bayleaf also created a Help widget to encourage users to self-determine if their complaint fell within ASC jurisdiction or another regulatory body. Bayleaf also suggested putting the FAQs on the landing page to provide contextual help instead of directing them away.

ENHANCING THE FORM

The original form was responsive, but the design wasn’t implemented with mobile in mind. It required users to scroll sideways to view all tabs/steps in the form, so they couldn’t see the process fully. Bayleaf revised the design so users could see how many steps there were immediately, added indicators to completed steps and forced sequential progression to prevent users from jumping around the form. To clean-up the form, long help text was put into tooltips and displayed when a user clicked a relevant field, providing contextual information.

Validation enhancements were performed, so that if multiple issues existed, they were all flagged simultaneously, allowing the user to fix them all at once. The previous form only flagged the first error, forcing the user to submit several times if multiple errors existed.