The politics behind bad user experience

By Raph Majma

Originally published in the Public Interest Technology blog.

We’ve all seen it: a long line of visibly upset people who are wondering how much longer they’ll have to be there. While they stand there, there’s a form that has to be filled out. The person who handed them the clipboard knows that this piece of paper will travel a long way to its final destination—a box somewhere, locked away and only to be seen again if there’s some problem in accounting.

This probably describes every doctor’s office you’ve ever visited, and every trip to the DMV. But what about when the stakes are higher? What happens when an immigrant doesn’t have hours to wait to speak to a volunteer attorney? Bad user experience represents more than an inconvenience—it can be harmful.

Unfortunately, bad user experiences like this are often the norm, because people who confer benefits don’t often have the time to consider what the whole process looks like from the applicant’s eyes. Their focus, understandably, is squarely on what information they need to collect. When I worked in government, I saw firsthand just how routine difficult processes like these are for applicants, and now, I have found how pervasive bad process design is in the nonprofit community as well.

The pain of forms is universal across government and nonprofit service providers. Forms are written in confusing legal language, require an excessive amount of sensitive information, and can be extremely repetitive. Of course, gathering that information is crucial—it can show whether or not an applicant qualifies for a particular benefit. But these forms often require information from individuals that the government agency or nonprofit already has, creating a time consuming and unnecessary hassle for both the applicant and the provider.

The examples of bad forms creating negative user experiences are endless—from veterans struggling to get healthcare and college benefits to the long wait times for legal permanent residents trying to naturalize. In government, there are few incentives to actually improve the application experience, because if everyone who qualified and applied for benefits immediately received them, the government couldn’t afford it. Paper is slower, and it allows agencies to keep up with and anticipate demand.

Even if everyone agrees to improve a process, designing a user-centric form for benefit applications is harder than it seems in both the government and nonprofit space. In a vacuum, it’s easy to approach a blank whiteboard and dream up a better experience. But when you have to start adding in bits of reality, like database integration or changing physical workstations or breaking a reliance on printers, the redesign can feel like an insurmountable challenge.

What happens when an immigrant doesn’t have hours to wait to speak to a volunteer attorney? Bad user experience represents more than an inconvenience—it can be harmful.

I’ve spent the past several months working with a nonprofit that assists low-income immigrants, helping them replace their paper information gathering process with a series of digital tools. We’re tackling their membership application first—because that seemed like the easiest, most lightweight thing to replace. But even starting small, the process has been a struggle.

We’ve hit two major snags that are relatively common among any agency that tries to redesign a process. Primarily, there is a lack of resources, in all forms of the word. In order to redesign the applicant experience, you need time, people, and money, three things often in short supply. The time is for devising a better process, the people are for owning this process and ensuring that it doesn’t break down, and the money is for hiring a technologist or purchasing technology, when necessary. If even one of these isn’t available, the redesign fails. Unfortunately, service providers often have a desire to do better, but process improvement is pitted against helping those directly in front of them right now. They could change how they do things, but that means they’d have to turn people away. The reality they face is impossible.

If a new process is successfully designed, the second snag still lies in the way. It’s really hard to bring new technology into an organization used to doing things a certain way. If you integrate a technology that is too complicated, the training sessions will take forever and people will quickly find a way to subvert the new process because it’s faster in the short term. Data management presents another challenge—if you remove a line of information from a form, it can be seen as antagonistic, even if that data wasn’t ever used or useful. Changing the way people work needs to be done thoughtfully.

Right now, it isn’t clear if we’ll be able to successfully replace a cumbersome paper process with a lightweight digital tool, or if the body will reject the transplant. Our goal is to reduce as many employee steps as possible, while also creating an easier and quicker process for the applicants. If the new process works, it can save time and energy for the organization. If it doesn’t work, we’ll pivot, and try something else. But regardless of if we succeed on the first try or not, the problems we face here will persist in so many other organizations and sectors.

So there’s more work to be done, but there is strong hope for the future. We should strive to minimize the burden of accessing benefits so that our most vulnerable communities can access services when they need it. In an ideal world, both government and nonprofit service providers take process redesign seriously, so in the future, you only have to fill out one form, and stand in one (hopefully short!) line.