The Unfortunate User Experience of Being Unemployed in America
I could have never imagined how quickly everything would change because of the Coronavirus. I had landed a role as a Social Media Manager and Photographer for a famous, James Beard award-winning chef and her restaurant group. Finally, all of my years in various creative fields and my passion for restaurants were coming together. Then, on March 15th, I lost it all overnight.
If you had told me in September I would have finally been laid off, half a year after that day, I wouldn’t have believed you. As I headed home on Friday, March 13th, I truly believed that I would just be away from my office for two weeks as we waited for everything to calm down and be controlled. My boss texted me the bad news on the 15th, that everyone in our restaurant group was being furloughed and we would all have to apply for unemployment. I never considered that I would have to take advantage of unemployment benefits, and when we got our directions from HR on how to do so, it seemed very simple and straightforward.
That assumption could also have not been further from reality.
More than half of U.S. state government unemployment sites crashed within the first surge of unemployment claims. In some ways, I was fortunate to have been first to be furloughed because I had “early access” to unemployment before the crushing number of applicants crashed the system. But, it turned out the ability to function with unprecedented levels of traffic wasn’t the only metric for a successful site. The applications seem intentionally verbose, with a lot of double negative questions. When I made a mistake with my application, I called to try to have it resolved only to be kept on a busy line for 3 hours only to have my call ended. Eventually, I found a roundabout way to amend my application, thanks to instructions from Reddit users and not thanks to the unemployment site itself. Furthermore, I experienced login issues pretty much every time I revisited the site, bringing me to dead pages or the website being down all-together. As much as I struggled with finally being able to access unemployment benefits, my story does not come close to some of the hurdles other unemployed Americans had to overcome.
The stories on Reddit are absolutely heartbreaking. Some users were not able to access a website and, like me, had to wait on the phone for hours upon hours to get a real person to help them with their claim. There are people fully eligible for benefits and starving or being evicted from their housing because they cannot access a government website to submit a claim and receive benefits. About 20% of Americans do not have access to a desktop computer and must access a mobile version of their state’s unemployment site, but some state’s sites are not mobile-friendly. Florida states outright that their site is not responsive and, in fact, ⅓ of state unemployment websites do not work on mobile.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation tested the accessibility of all state unemployment websites and 84% of the sites failed at least one test. If you measure these sites against usability heuristics, they fail on so many fronts. In my experience, Illinois’ site is not flexible, does not help users recover from errors, and is packed with type in no particular hierarchy. I am a visually abled person and I still had difficulty discerning typography and calls-to-action on the page. If I put myself in the shoes of someone with a disability, the prospects of completing the job of submitting an unemployment claim feel like an impossible task.
This year has been filled with let down after let down by our leaders in the US but this technological failure felt intentionally cruel based on the general attitude of our federal government towards any form of social safety net. It feels personal, sometimes I am asking myself “Are these sites designed this way on purpose?” As our government technological infrastructure succumbs when tested to its limits, it is clear that we need to invest in making our websites more accessible. It is these deeply personal challenges that have inspired me to look forward to a career in UX because our world needs people who empathize with users and can design for inclusion, especially when it comes to services that are meant to protect and provide for citizens.