The Blue Bag Enigma
For the last few months, I’ve been conscientiously collecting marginally-recyclable stuff - cling film, chocolate wrappers, plastic lids - into one of those translucent blue bags issued by Mendip Council for recycling. The scheme, I understand, is a trial.
I finally ran out of the bags - which on their flexible blue bodies advertise no hint as to how to replace themselves.
I assumed I could order more. Mendip Council has a website, a portal for the use of the locals. Where is the button marked "Request more recycling bags"?
The site, labyrinthine and bureaucratically unhelpful, offered no mention, no hint, even, of the scheme’s existence. Google did not help: its pointer to 'My Waste Services' was a maze to nowhere.
It was ChatGPT which finally cracked the puzzle: a secondary, modified, covert copy of that main waste-recycling webpage. It's the home of FlexCollect (the pilot programme). You may request more bags, but only here.
Why did finding it require the use of an AI system trained on the accumulated, posted wisdom of the entire human race? Because the public website interface design mirrors the mind of the bureaucracy, not the citizen. The service is imagined only from the inside: defined by council IT staff working for the bureaucracy and trapped in their functional reality.
We, the people, meanwhile, observe from the outside. We're totally ignorant of the layout of the council, its offices and its baroque division of labour.
We had this argument back in the 1980s. “User-centred design” we called it back then. But such ideas remain exotic to monopoly institutions. After all, if your customers can’t switch supplier, why waste effort and money by trying to think like the customer?
After all, we don't really know how they think, do we?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. Keep it polite and no gratuitous links to your business website - we're not a billboard here.