Experimentation Works for Improving Consumer Incident Reporting
The Consumer Product Safety Program is excited to represent Health Canada in Experimentation Works (EW). We are exploring ways of improving our consumer incident reporting process.
Incident reporting is when you tell us about health or safety concerns with your consumer product
We each use consumer products every day. Here are a few examples: mugs, electronics, furniture, clothes, toys, sports equipment and craft supplies. If a product injures you or has a defect, what would you do?
Our program wants you to tell us when something goes wrong with a consumer product that could’ve affected or did affect your health or safety. We call these “incidents” and they include:
- Products that may have caused an injury or death
- Product defects
- Products that may have resulted in property damage
- Incorrect or not enough information on labels or in instructions for safe use
- Something that happened due to a product and that could have resulted in an injury
The Consumer Product Safety Program is the federal regulatory program that protects Canadians from unsafe consumer products. Part of how we do this is through surveillance of the marketplace. We are looking for early warning signs of potential issues with consumer products that could impact human health or safety. You can imagine we have a lot of ground to cover. Canada is a large country and Canadians have access to a lot of different consumer products from online sources and physical stores.
Our business problem
As a program, we believe that the current rate of reporting from consumers is low and could be improved. A low rate of reporting reduces our ability to identify hazards and manage risks with consumer products in the marketplace. Increased reporting gives us more data that we can use to identify issues and trends with these products in Canada.
What we had already done
Last year, Health Canada’s i.Hub (innovation center) led 15 program staff through a design thinking session. To identify existing issues with our surveillance activities, the group used systems mapping, small-scale interviews with friends and family and empathy mapping. One of the priority themes that emerged was improving incident reporting and this formed the foundation for this project.
Pains are obstacles or challenges that someone may face, in this case, when trying to report an incident to us. Possible pains related to our incident reporting process were identified as:
- Challenges in filling out the form
- Poor brand recognition
- Absence of trust from consumers for the regulator
- Lack of transparency (like not hearing anything after a form is submitted)
Every project has constraints
- Our incident report form at canada.ca/report-a-product is long and looks intimidating. We would like to simplify the form. Our past experience tells us this is no tiny feat. If we’re considering form re-form, we need to work with collaborators from different parts of our department. We can’t realistically expect that they will be able to collaborate on our project at the drop of a hat. We will simplify the form…but we need more time (than afforded to us as part of EW) to do it right.
- The most direct way of increasing the number of incident reports from consumers could be to do heavier and better targeted promotion of both ourselves and the incident report form. Raising consumer awareness is important…but we also don’t want to bring more people to a clunky reporting process. This is why we’re focusing on simplifying the process and making it more meaningful first.
- We have data gaps. We learned that we don’t have a historical baseline on basic web counts because we haven’t been tracking analytics for our incident report form (we’ve since fixed this). Because the form is a single web page and data is only collected into our system when you submit the form, we have no information on consumers who drop-out (start the form but don’t complete it). Some fields on the form could give us insight to better understand users…except that these are not required fields and we have a lot of null responses.
To work around our practical constraints, we decided to carry out this project in phases. First, we will focus on improving the incident reporting experience. Concurrently, we will set ourselves up to tackle simplification of the form by connecting with stakeholders and getting in the appropriate queues. Once our process is easier and simpler, we’ll focus on trying to bring more people to it. So over time, we will tackle the different pain points using various experimental approaches.
Research question that we’ll tackle for EW: How might we motivate consumers who reach the incident reporting landing page but may not initiate (and complete) the form?
General approach: One of the pain points identified during the design thinking session related to a lack of transparency with the reporting process. Through our EW experiment, we will explore what may or may not work to get more consumers to start and complete the reporting process. Our sandbox will be the text and layout of the incident reporting landing page (Canada.ca/report-a-product). One of our challenges in designing the experiment is honing in on what our ultimate desired outcome is and how to measure impact.
What’s worked well for us
Our management and executives are providing us with cover
- We are afforded a large sand box to network broadly and experiment
- They support us if and when we need it, have offered to tackle barriers with us and empower us to make the best decisions we can
Access to knowledge and expertise through the experimentation experts in different departments
- Not only do they share relatable experiences from their own work but they provide an objective view for the project
- The experts bring skill sets that we don’t have ready access to in our program or even in our department
Being curious about other people’s work and experiences
- It never ceases to amaze me how generous people are with their time when you want to learn about their work, their skills or similar experiences that may help advance your own project.
Post written by Mari Takeda and the EW team from Health Canada
Article également disponible en français ici: https://medium.com/@exp_oeuvre
