Twitter redesigned its reporting process for policy violations, and it’s now widely available. It uses a “symptoms-first reporting flow” designed to make it easier to report bad behavior—some details from the Verge.
Previously, Twitter’s process would ask which policy has been broken, and then ask for more details. Instead, the new flow asks for details on what’s happened, before getting more granular about which rules may have been broken. Twitter’s blog post likened the new process to a doctor asking “Where does it hurt?” rather than immediately jumping to specifics.
Early results from the testing have been positive. Twitter says the number of “actionable reports” increased by 50 percent as a result of the new process.
Why do we care?
I’m not interested in this for the specific Twitter feature but instead for the approach. It diagnoses the symptoms by asking about the symptoms. I’m left thinking a lot about customer experience here.
The previous process made assumptions that users knew the policies. By asking “which policy was broken,” the user was required to know more about the internal workings of Twitter. Moving to a “where does it hurt” model removes that requirement from the end user. It’s smart.
Think about the use of your own interaction with a customer – do you require your users to know more than they have to about your internal workings? Can you remove that?