The filters of our discontent
The ‘Give feedback on care’ service (GFC) has a text field search function to locate the relevant service that a user can provide feedback on. Users are encouraged to query the list of providers by either service name or address. Results can then be reduced by a filter on the types of services.
Filters are helpful tool for users to narrow the number of search results and focus the topic or keyword of their search by key themes. In the case of Give feedback on care, our filters enable users to segment their results by types of services i.e. only showing care homes. This can be particularly convenient when the user’s query has generated a large number of results or multiple results share similar names.
How are users engaging with filters?
Based on tags set up in Google Tag Manager, we can see that the most popular filters users are engaging with are ‘Care home’ (44%), ‘Care in your home’ (15%), followed by ‘Hospital — NHS’ and ‘GP Surgery — NHS’ (both at 7%).
This broadly covers the same types of services that users are providing feedback on, so no major surprises there!
Data in our analytics indicates that only 11% of sessions involving search use a filter to refine their search, which is relatively low and can be shown as a strength of the search results.
Despite most of our users providing feedback through mobile (60.7%) compared to desktop (30.9%) and tablet (8.4%), there is stronger engagement with filters on desktop. 69% of search filter clicks take place on desktop, 15.2% on mobile, and 15.9% on tablet.
Mobile filters have a harder job to convey the same amount of information in a tighter space, which desktop has the breathing space for. Typical user issues can include:
- long filtering menus
- challenges in apply multiple filters
- difficulty in adjusting filtering choice
It’s known that mobile engagement for filters will be lower, somewhere between 2–10%, compared to that of desktop and tablet. This is apparent in our data showing mobile filter engagement at 1.8%, tablet at 11.5% and desktop at 17.6%.
However, this is only looking at part of the story…
Applying filters
The GFC filter system is a two-step process. Once a user has selected a ‘filter’ they need to click on ‘apply filter’ for the search to be refined. At this point, we’re seeing a disconnect in user interaction. Of the those that select a filter only 50% are clicking on apply filter.
- There are 460 sessions (11.2% of sessions with search) in which a user has clicked on a search filter
- 228 sessions, where the user has also clicked ‘apply filter’
- 232 sessions, where the user has clicked on a filter but does not click ‘apply filter’
- 130 sessions where the user clicks on a care service after applying a filter
Overall, the use of filters is 28% successful in providing users the correct search result.
Improvements to filters
Breaking this down by device category, we can see that the main disparity between select and apply is taking place on desktop (38%) and on tablet (30%), where the majority of filter interactions are taking place. In contrast mobile users, although smaller in numbers are having more success in clicking ‘apply filters’ (67%)
Considerations need to be made with how we improve the interactions. A 1-step filtering process, where the page reloads after selection could increase the success of users clicking through past the search results page . We are also assuming that users only require filtering by one ‘type of service’, which in the case of providing feedback on a specific care service seems highly likely.
Submissions and conversion rates
Although there was concern about a gradual decline in form starts and submissions from the 23rd March, the past two weeks have shown a slight rise in the overall conversion rate from a low of 39.98% to 43.71% in the last week.
The overall numbers that highlight that the total number of users clicking on ‘start now’ has gone up and consequently the number of submissions have also increased, which is great news.
The next focus for the team should be on narrowing the gap between ‘form starts’ and ‘submissions’…
Where do we go from here?
- Review and make recommendations on the filter interactions with the designers. Considerations required at different device levels.
- Changes would be deemed successful, if we see an uplift in 28% of successful filter searches
- Observe impact of ‘soft-launch’ of the GFC campaign: https://www.cqc.org.uk/get-involved/share-your-experience/give-feedback-care-during-coronavirus-covid-19-emergency
Date referenced is from 16th Apr 2020 — 11th May 2020
