The Usability of Unemployment
By: Daveena Tauber
Tags: Unemployment, User Experience Research, Civic Tech, User Experience, Oregon

M.C. Escher “Relativity”

In March 2020, over 10 million Americans shared the user experience of filing for unemployment. We need to understand what that experience was like.

States for their part, appeared overwhelmed by this sudden mass engagement with their digital architecture, while citizens seemed entirely underwhelmed.

At a time like this, should we be worrying about niceties like user experience?

I think we should.

It’s worth remembering that the experience the user cares about in this use case is not whether the website is delightful, but whether it will help them put food on the table. The digital experience is a means to an important civic end. At best a poorly designed government web form is an annoyance; at worst it’s a barrier to accessing vital resources.

Let’s say you have just lost your job (hopefully this is a thought experiment; if not, consider it a two-minutes hate) and you are confronted with this screen:

Now let’s say that you are low vision, or hell, older than 43. Let’s say that you are not a native speaker of English. Let’s say that you have an 8th-grade reading level. You could be forgiven for feeling a little daunted at the prospect of parsing this single-spaced prose poem.

The screen doesn’t answer practical questions like: what if you meet the criteria for calling the Unemployment Centers and today is Friday? Should you call today? Wait until next Friday?

Nor does it answer more philosophical questions like what even does it mean to work inside or outside of a state in this age of remote labor?

Most alarmingly, though, the screen ends with a series of veiled threats. You won’t be able to correct anything. Don’t even try. It does not say what will happen if you do. Oh, and…you have 10 minutes to complete each page. Or else what? That information is apparently given on a need-to-know basis. No presh.

The page ends with a koan: what would it mean to cancel an entire transaction one hasn’t yet begun?

This is an example of having to undertake a high-stakes journey with an incomplete mental map. You know that the process could take 30 minutes and that you will see a summary of your answers after you complete it (will you be able to make corrections then?). You have no idea of how many steps are involved. And because you don’t know what you don’t know, you may not think to look for help at this point.

Still, if you have the prescience to click Unemployment Insurance Benefits Information, you are bounced back to the main page, where you will have to sort through the help options all by your lonesome. If you click Unemployment Insurance Centers, you’re confronted with another seeming paradox: a system that again announces it is no longer handling things through local centers and then asks for your zip code, which certainly seems like an attempt to pinpoint your locality.

To most new users, the difference between an Unemployment Insurance Center and a local Employment office is a distinction without a difference. It’s cognitive noise. Yesterday you barely knew that Local Employment Offices existed and now you have to worry that they’re closed? Huh?

This is an example of not considering the information needs of the majority of users and where they are in their relationship to the system.

What I need to know that this form doesn’t tell me is that

This is the last time I will see the link to the Unemployment Insurance Benefits Information ever again. Unfortunately, I don’t know this. I do know I can’t exit the system at any point during the journey, so if I need help beyond the (inscrutable) in-context help offered during the process, I have to remember where this help was located, open another tab to look for it, or I’m just SOL.

This screen does not announce that one part of the process requires receiving, via the U.S. snail mails, a form confirming the amount of benefit and a Customer ID that I will need to file my claim and set up direct deposit. Nowhere does it suggest what to do if I don’t have access to a permanent address. What if I am a college student stranded at a friend’s house because my dorm was evacuated, and I don’t know how long I’ll be here?

At the bottom of this screen I learn that I will be timed out if I take more than 10 minutes on a page. Two screens later I come across another warning about the perils that await me should I try to turn back.

And on screen 6, yet another.

And in case the fear of accidentally exiting, clicking “back,” or getting distracted for more than 10 minutes (because, say, you’re simultaneously trying to homeschool your kids), isn’t enough, there is a final test at the bottom of every page.

Here you’re confronted with two choices: Cancel, which appears active and Continue, which appears inactive, forcing you to overcome the intuitive move, cultivated by common button convention, to click the interaction that seems active.

This is a call to error rather than a call to action.

As it turns out, nothing about this session — not your social security number, not your pin, not the three security questions you chose — are saved until you hit “submit,” at which point it is presumably too late to correct your answers. This means you could be 15 screens into the workflow and one careless backward glance, navigationally speaking, will turn your application to a pillar of salt.

In addition, the absence of useful information hierarchy means that the system relies on a bewildering plethora of design patterns to grab attention. The paradoxical result is confusion, not clarity.

At every point where a system introduces confusion, cognitive burden, or opportunities for error, it’s probably fair to say that it is losing users. In this case that means failing someone who is entitled to benefits.

One thing I have learned from working on enterprise systems is that the user and the system are often bound together through a kind of enlightened self-interest. This is because burden on the user often results in burden on the system in the form of help requests and general ire. And burden on the system results in burden on the user in the form of long wait times and system outages. Rinse, repeat.

There is evidence of this vicious circle in the nightly email missives from my state senator begging citizens not to tie up the phone lines trying to get help filing their claims.

While sheer volume is part of the issue here, system clarity is certainly another.

There is good research showing that stress reduces cognitive function, which means that users who are stressed may have less resilience, less ability to focus on complex tasks, and less ability to problem solve when tasks aren’t clear.

Moments of mass stress like these lay bare the idea that usability is a must have, not a nice-to-have.

User experience research in the civic tech space helps system architects and designers think through the kind of information citizens need, provides heuristic design analysis like the one below, and conducts usability testing that allow systems to meet user needs.

There has never been a more important moment to hire user experience researchers.

Here are a few recommendations that would improve the experience for users in this Oregon case study: