Online gov services are mostly time-wasting duplicates, says EU Sick of repeating the same information every time you need the authorities to help you out? So is the European Commission. According to a new study on eGovernment services, users are still asked to fill in forms with information already available to bureaucrats more than half the time. And if you’re on the move it gets worse …
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Why am I more likely to make a type in my email address than anything else? Doesn't everybody just copy and paste it between the fields, anyway?
Yes, but there are a significant number of sites where some bastard UI developer from hell has gone to the trouble of disabling copy and paste in these fields.
"Yes, but there are a significant number of sites where some bastard UI developer from hell has gone to the trouble of disabling copy and paste in these fields"
Not only that, but numerous sites try and tell me that my email address incorporating +siteidentifier is not a valid address (which it is). Why can't they read the RFCs to find out what is valid, instead of randomly guessing?
Not mine, as obviously that won't be my problem to deal with - but having had to deal with one of these, the biggest problem isn't repeated information, it's "what am I supposed to do next?". Every time you think you're going to find an official step by step guide (and STFW is just as bad, if not worse) you are let down by the realisation that most of it is in fact covering all those weird exceptions that happened to one person once back in the 1600s.
It never had to be grand or complicated : These forms by those dates, here's a list of departments not on the 'tell us once' system, here's a printed flowchart thing so you know what happens next and how long you have to get it done. But no, instead the secret knowledge is not unlocked until you have completed the current level and suddenly you are back on a countdown clock again.
And don't get me started on solicitors and accountants failing to live up to reasonable expectations...
Registry Offices often supply an information pack produced by the county council, which brings us to the question as to why are county councils are having to produce information because central government (at least in England) can't be bothered. The information packs will also vary between counties which is evidently wrong too.
Tell Us Once is a nice idea but the DWP itself is manifestly unable to cope with bereavement, you just enter telephone menu hell then get told to ring somewhere else and start again with more telephone menu hell at a time when you really can not be bothered with it.
"Forms pre-filled with data already available to public administrations (e.g. date of birth, home address, marital status) would stop wasting everyone’s time, but are available only in 45 per cent of cases."
Only 45%?
Bollocks, I don't believe it's a tenth of that. Not that that's a bad thing per se...
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