4 ms·

I thought this was an interesting read. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement for websites that allow you to sign up for government benefits (although

I thought this was an interesting read. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement for websites that allow you to sign up for government benefits (although i suspect in some cases the friction is intentional). My biggest gripe with govenrnment websites is not the parts where they're taking in user data, but the parts where they silo their public data. In my experience this is the worst at the local and federal level. Infuriatingly, my local city council does not OCR their most recent minutes, but they do OCR their archived minutes. So you can search their minutes, just as long as they aren't relevant anymore. Another thing is using javascript buttons to serve PDF files, and filenames have no refeence point with their titles. So if you need a few at once you've gotta stop and manually change the filename from 123455325.pdf to something intelligible.

matsemann 2y ago
> (although i suspect in some cases the friction is intentional) I've worked on the first digital forms for NAV in Norway, which handles parental leave, sick leave, when you've lost your job etc. We didn't want friction. People have a right to this help and money, and making people self served is a win for all: - around 90 % of submitted paper forms had some kind of error, which the case worker would have to fix while entering the form manually into the case system. Often had to contact the client and spend so much time on things not giving value. - people would have to contact case workes constantly, because the forms were made by lawyers. "If you filled in 16a you also need to fill in 46ac and 47f" would give a huge tree of possibilities most people couldn't navigate. - making the form digital, we could conditionally show the correct parts. We could pull in data from other systems and prefill parts (like your employer, registered kids, address) - the first version we actually just sent to a printer and someone would print and mail all digital forms so the case workers still would have to do much of the manual typing, but at least we quickly made it easier for the clients. - then later when the case systems were ready we could instead push some xml directly instead of mailing paper. The clients didn't notice a difference. But this to say that we really tried making their lives easier even before everything else was in place. - the core is that we want the case workers to do less of the useless things, and spend their time doing the valuable things. - the first digital version of the parental leave form was basically what we kall "strøm på papir" or "electrical powered paper". While it was digital and easier to use, it didn't solve all issues with the paper form, as it still contained all questions and was huge. Then it was a lot of work, political, with lawyers, even law makers, if the next version could be better. Is there things we could stop asking for? Could the law be streamlined and edge cases removed? Etc. All to make it so that the common 95 % don't have to be confused and have to read and understand lots of stuff only relevant to a small minority.

matsemann 2y ago

> (although i suspect in some cases the friction is intentional) I've worked on the first digital forms for NAV in Norway, which handles parental leave, sick leave, when you've lost your job etc. We didn't want friction. People have a right to this help and money, and making people self served is a win for all: - around 90 % of submitted paper forms had some kind of error, which the case worker would have to fix while entering the form manually into the case system. Often had to contact the client and spend so much time on things not giving value. - people would have to contact case workes constantly, because the forms were made by lawyers. "If you filled in 16a you also need to fill in 46ac and 47f" would give a huge tree of possibilities most people couldn't navigate. - making the form digital, we could conditionally show the correct parts. We could pull in data from other systems and prefill parts (like your employer, registered kids, address) - the first version we actually just sent to a printer and someone would print and mail all digital forms so the case workers still would have to do much of the manual typing, but at least we quickly made it easier for the clients. - then later when the case systems were ready we could instead push some xml directly instead of mailing paper. The clients didn't notice a difference. But this to say that we really tried making their lives easier even before everything else was in place. - the core is that we want the case workers to do less of the useless things, and spend their time doing the valuable things. - the first digital version of the parental leave form was basically what we kall "strøm på papir" or "electrical powered paper". While it was digital and easier to use, it didn't solve all issues with the paper form, as it still contained all questions and was huge. Then it was a lot of work, political, with lawyers, even law makers, if the next version could be better. Is there things we could stop asking for? Could the law be streamlined and edge cases removed? Etc. All to make it so that the common 95 % don't have to be confused and have to read and understand lots of stuff only relevant to a small minority.