To discourage littering behaviour, the NSW Environmental Protection Agency encourages the community to digitally report littering from vehicles, stinging litterers with fines.

As the Premier’s priority was to reduce litter by 40%, the EPA wanted more reports that resulted in convictions, and reduced cost-to-serve. As part of NSW government's shift toward customer-centricity, the interface required a redesign informed by user-research in parallel to new solution architecture as the pre-existing digital experience was outdated, full of friction and had a high exit-rate. CEC was engaged to redesign the 'Report a Tosser' digital experience, making it easier to successfully lodge a high-quality report that results in more convictions, and less littering.

CEC designed a complete and accessible responsive UI, validated by litter reporters, and ready for build. We carried out an expert audit of the existing design to understand the system’s complexities.

We designed solutions, continuously validating with stakeholders and NSW Government’s digital design standards to ensure technical feasibility and accessibility. Existing reporters were invited to test the interfaces revealing where the design needed to pivot, enabling the team to deliver build-ready design specifications.

Aside from enabling a simpler and more intuitive process, the user experience sought to encourage reporters to make reporting a habit by giving feedback and rewarding regular reporters. Reporters could also keep track of the actions the EPA were taking in response to their submission, for example: if the report was currently under investigation, or if it had reached a resolution. 

The success of the project lay in clear vision, clear guidelines, and consistent cooperation between designers and stakeholders to achieve an efficient design easily adopted by users.  

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The impact

As a result of our work, it is more likely that reports with the right information will be submitted, driving littering behaviour down across the state. Our design delivered an experience that was desirable and easy for users to report, with an average user satisfaction rating of 8.8/10, and encouraged users to report again. 

The interface patterns were designed to be scalable across all of EPA’s reporting platforms so that in the future other litter reports such as illegal dumping and noise and air pollution can be re-released with an intuitive interface.