There is a straightforward relationship between the number of fields on a safety form and the number of reports a business receives, and it is not a gentle one. This post is about getting to three.
Key takeaways
Three inputs: what happened, a photo if there is one, and the anonymity choice.
Location, time, site and reporter are inferred, and all are editable.
The anonymity choice is offered first, because it changes what people write.
There is no category dropdown. Categorising is done afterwards from the description.
A report can be sent with no photo and no location. Neither is required.
Three inputs
Fig 1. The whole reporting flow. Asking about anonymity first is a small ordering decision that materially changes the content of the reports you receive.
App integration
Machine learning
Security & identity
Front-end & mobile
Why anonymity comes first
If somebody types a description and is then asked whether to attach their name, they have already written it as a named person. Asking first means an anonymous report is written as an anonymous report, which is frequently a different and more useful document — particularly when what somebody wants to say involves how a job is usually done rather than a one-off.
The trade-off is stated in one line where the choice is made: “Anonymous means we cannot ask you anything about it.” That is genuine and it is the whole cost, and most people who choose anonymity have understood it and chosen it anyway.
What is inferred
Field
Inferred from
Editable?
Time
Now
Yes — “this happened yesterday” is common
Location
The phone, if permitted
Yes, and it can be typed instead
Site
Which site boundary the location falls in
Yes, and it is a short pick list
Reporter
The signed staff link
Only by choosing anonymous
Category
The description, afterwards
By whoever triages, not the reporter
Severity
The description, afterwards
By whoever triages, not the reporter
The last two rows are the important ones. Asking a reporter to categorise an incident makes them think about how the business classifies things instead of about what happened, and asking them to rate severity invites them to talk themselves out of reporting: “it was only a near miss” is how a near miss goes unreported.
No dropdowns
The strongest temptation in this design is a category list, because it makes everything downstream easier. It is also the single most effective way to reduce your report count, for a reason that is easy to miss: a person standing in a yard with a phone who cannot see a category that fits will assume the system is not for this and stop.
Fig 2. The trade the whole design is built on. Everything a dropdown would have captured can be recovered from the description afterwards, and the description only exists if the form was short enough to fill in.
The photo
Optional, and it does more work than any field would. A photograph of a stack of pallets carries the height, the position, the surroundings and the lighting, none of which anybody would have typed. It also makes the report concrete for whoever reads it, which measurably changes how quickly an action gets created.
It uploads with a presigned PUT straight to S3, so a phone on a yard connection is not holding anything open, and the report is submitted whether or not the upload has finished. A report that fails because a photo did not upload is a report lost.