The problem isn’t “government services” in general, it’s poorly done government services. And what usually causes that is a lack of sufficient funding. Which in turn is usually caused by suckers voting in politicians who feed them the lie that “anything that has to do with the government is bad!” Then those politicians do everything they can while in office to further destroy government services, usually in the hopes of replacing them with privatized ones. Which in turn end up costing even more, and working even less well than the underfunded government services they replaced (e.g., charter schools).
Okay, Massachusetts has a lousy unemployment website. As the MN example shows, the culprit isn’t the fact that it’s a government website.
You know about anecdote vs. statistics, but anyway,
I’m one data point who had exactly zero trouble getting thru the whole MA setup. And spent less than 2 minutes per week doing the weekly update/request forms online, too.
Yo @codinghorror@sam whoever, the title of this topic said “unyemploment” until I changed it. Now I notice, though, that the topic has moved from the “boing” section to the “dizzy” section. Is this how it’s all supposed to work?
the last large software company i worked at had an internal website so obtuse they gave out guides to new employees for how to access payroll, health, etc… actual screen by screen shots with what to click on.
as if that wasn’t enough – they then changed the website to make it more “user friendly” and re-issued guides for how to find things under the new still horrible design.
i think we see it more with government because it’s all so public. all those horrible products which various companies get locked into are hidden behind closed doors.
it seems tricky. yes, there’s a base amount of money needed for good results – and often programs are starved – but then sometimes we shower money with no oversight and it winds up with graft. ( iraq war contractors. )
when it’s a consumer product, bad software dies – or the threat of economic death makes them slowly improve. ( windows 98? ) maybe the problem is when bad government software ( or some bad vendor software ) gets written, it doesn’t die. it gets locked in.
there are – in some places – no consequences for doing a bad job. and sometimes not even enough trustworthy experts on hand to even decide what “bad” or “good” means.
at any rate: definitely not a “government is bad, business is good” issue.
I agree with your whole comment, but I’d add here that we also see it more because we’ve been led by capitalist propaganda to believe that government services in general are inefficient. If a business is inefficient, we blame that business, not businesses in general, nor usually even that particular type of business.
I know a lot of folks are saying it’s relatively clear in the screenshots. I disagree. I can read it. But I don’t have to read it in order to get paid this week. Hard-to-read becomes impossible-to-read when you’re stressed and you have to rely on something.
On one hand, I wouldn’t be surprised. On the other hand, looking at this thing it seems they don’t know tables for layout have been depreciated. Like. Over 10 years ago. This is the kind of bad you do when you don’t know better or don’t care.
You couldn’t pay me to build an interface this bad. Now you want to pay me to throw a pile of late 90s “under construction” GIFs onto a page using blink tags and autoplaying midi through a quicktime plugin, I’m your developer.
Closed messages or server not responding? If the latter, it could be a power saving measure. I guess they have their startup routine pretty solid if they’re actually shutting them off.
For folks who don’t specialize in ux, maybe? But if you specialize in it, you get a good idea what people want and expect and then get a group of people who haven’t seen it before to test it out.
It worked on Chrome for me this year.
Disagree. Can’t say much about the DMV angle but federal tax forms are a byzantine nightmare. Even with close reading of the forms and instructions, I sweat bullets through tax season and massive degrees of uncertainty every year.
Best thing I ever did for my sanity was shut down my LLC so I had three fewer forms to deal with every year.
Cockroaches don’t have to file for unemployment. In this case, the most kafkaesque thing would be to stay painfully human.
The other big thing that people are missing out on here is that we (“people who are commenting on an article about web UI on a comment thread”) are part of a group of people that knows how the internet works.
Why should the ability to navigate a website (which is itself a smaller subset of a huge swathe of digital literacies) being a functional requirement for government assistance?
Remember the alternative? I’ve never actually set foot in an unemployment office, and I haven’t applied over the phone in at least 20 years, but I apply for UI every year, when whatever show I’m working on goes on hiatus, and even the craptacular California Employment Development Department’s website is far less of a pain in the ass than doing it over the phone (or–shudder–in person) would be.
Actually, I can’t really complain about the EDD’s system, which they call eApply4UI. It’s complicated, and involves a whole lot more boring reading than is remotely necessary, but I’ve always managed to get my checks on time. I hate to think what it’s like for people for whom English is not their first language, however. Or people that don’t habitually hang on to the past year’s worth of paystubs.
…and people with poor eyesight. And people with imperfect literacy. And people who are unaccustomed to technology. And people with below-average intelligence. And people affected by mental illness. And people affected by brain injury, or early dementia. Etc etc etc.
In other words, all of the groups of people that you’d expect to be disproportionately represented amongst those requiring unemployment benefits.
kind of like the way we blame “dumb people” - individuals - for what are actually systemic issues. ( i will not turn this into a gun control thread. i will not turn this into a gun control thread. )
it’s an interesting point, though. we use the “government” as singular, when there are actually lots of governments. some do well, some do terrible. without nuance, people want to ditch it all, or support it all. both to its extremes.
In some countries, citizens can actually sue the government when administrative procedures aren’t user-friendly enough. It’s considered a denial of rights.
Absofuckinglutely. some of the most badly-designed and on occasion downright hostile software I’ve used has been bespoke enterprise-level stuff for big corps.
In the UK, back in the Before Times, yea even unto the Great Lines of Unemployed given to us by Thatcher the Dark one, you went in on a Tuesday and signed on the dotted line, then, upon the fourth day, the Lord said: ‘Let There Be Giros’ and the poor and destitute did rejoice mightily in the posession of their green cheques, and there was much buying of beer and weed.
It’s fucking awful now; you spend ages talking to robots, they expect everyone to have a pc & internet and it takes about ten weeks for the fuckers to sort out your claim. I’d sell weed on the street corner before I’d go back on the bloody dole.
Color me not surprised. I’d guess that the number of Massachusetts career “public servants” who have ever had to navigate this system as clients is extremely low.
I hope this isn’t a news flash, but different regions of the USA have very different cultures of government.
Some of us live in Garrisonkeillorville, while more (I think many more) live in Billybulger City. It would not surprise me to find that Massachusetts pols view their unemployment website as a complete success, because people they know made a nice buck off of it.
Which is why dreams of Scandinavian-style socialism in the United States are just that, and will remain so.
The Almost Perfect State which Bernie Sanders envisions will be administered not so much by honest, industrious, friendly Danes and Swiss, but by a long-entrenched cadre whose vision of public service is something like, “The best service the public can provide is to get a paycheck to my nephew.”
I can’t give 50 likes at once without creating a bunch of accounts, but your point is incredibly important.
It should not. The very people that need this kind of assistance, the people people that a just society should be helping because they need it and it makes the society better are the ones hurt by the assumption that everyone should be able to do this.
The other thing about unemployment assistance, is that it is your rmoney! You paid taxes specifically for this insurance and when you need it (say as insurance because you are unemployed) you should be able to get it (back) without difficulty.
If the latter, it could be a power saving measure. I guess they have their startup routine pretty solid if they’re actually shutting them off.
