Making categories work for you
We’ve now made it much easier for councils who have FixMyStreet Pro installed to:
- add context-specific guidance for users
- route report-makers off to a different place if desirable
- edit the names of categories.
The more you can do with your forms, the easier — and maybe even safer — it is for everyone.
For example, when someone picks “highways obstruction”, you might want to tell them that if the obstruction is a potential cause of accidents, they should make their report by phone.
Or when the ‘graffiti’ category is picked, you might want to add a question like, “Is this graffiti offensive?”. If the answer is ‘yes’, you know that you need to act more speedily to get it removed.
Pro users have always had the ability to do this, but we’ve now made it much simpler.
We’ve also added some extra functionality: if desired, when a user selects a particular category, or selects a particular answer to a question the form can be disabled altogether.
Here’s what these options look like in your admin interface:
Just check the box if you’d like submission to be disabled when a specific category is chosen. To add questions, use the ‘add field’ button.
Once you’ve created your question/s, you can use the interface above to decide what happens when they are answered in specific ways.
Use cases
Why would you want to disable your forms?
Well, thinking again of highways obstructions, you may wish to ensure that any and every such report is reported by phone rather than via the site, so that it can be attended to as a matter of urgency.
As soon as that category is chosen, you can display a message to say ‘Please report all highways obstructions by phone, for rapid attention‘ and give the relevant phone number.
Any user who doesn’t register the message, and continues to try using the form (let’s face it, we all skim text on the internet), will find that they can’t submit it.
Pointing the way
If required, you can also add a link to point the user to a more suitable place to make their report. This means that you may even want to include categories for issues that you don’t actually deal with.
If you already know, for example, that your residents come to FixMyStreet trying to report gas and water leaks, parking issues or antisocial behaviour, you can include these as options, but disable the form submission and provide the correct link to take them to a preferable reporting route.
Finally, just a small thing but one which will save you time and effort: we’ve made it easier to change category titles.
We’ll be adding all these details to the user manual imminently, and hope you enjoy the increased flexibility and control that these features give you.
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Image: Toa Heftiba