For many government services, the rules and regulations are horribly complicated. Working out which conditions need to be applied to which people in which circumstances is hard enough. Explaining that in a way in which normal people can understand can be harder still. There has been years of sustained effort to make explanations more comprehensible [...]
There is a famous New Yorker cartoon – two dogs sitting in front of a computer with the caption, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. I would save you the trouble of clicking on the link to see it, except that the New Yorker would like me to pay them $360 a year [...]
The idea that the best kind of government service is no service at all is not a new one. Government is necessarily part of the service economy, but much of it destined never to be part of the experience economy. The best kind of tax return is the one you don’t have to fill in; [...]
We are all familiar with the ‘nine out of ten cats prefer fresh mice’ school of advertising, so much so that it is a parody of itself. Here’s an interesting variant from BA: I am pleased to let you know that Terminal 5 continues to perform well. In May, 80% of our customers told us [...]
Government web sites have been a joke for almost as long as there have been web sites. They tend to be slow, clunky, and far behind their private-sector counterparts. Luckily for us, that’s the opening sentence of a piece about US federal websites, so no need here for immediate concern. It was prompted by a [...]
William Heath is the latest person to experience the joys of online tax disc renewal. As usual, his analysis is spot on: Hurrah for the car tax disc renewal process. It used to be both inconvenient and pointless. Now it’s just pointless. Not being inconvenient is, of course, a big step forward, but still falls [...]
Richard Allen had his driving licence stolen. Getting it replaced took a one minute phone call. That’s a disaster.
Frequently Asked Questions on websites tend to have a lot in common with the question and answer briefing notes which civil servants have been writing since time immemorial. In both cases, the temptation to write questions which happen to have straightforward answers, rather than the questions which any real people have ever actually asked, is [...]
Twenty years ago, I had a problem to solve. A museum was creating a database of the objects it held and needed to be able to produce reports in catalogue number order. The difficulty was that different numbering systems had been used at different times and catalogues with different numbering systems had been amalgamated without [...]
Peter Day’s latest programme for the World Service is about the principles of lean manufacturing applied to service industries. The download is here, but probably won’t work for more than a few days. The link to the programme web page is here. As usual, he finds some interesting people to talk to. One of them [...]