I know today’s headline is not a shock to anyone in the field of web development, with the possible exception of those people to got the no-bid contracts to create websites for the government, but since my latest experience with ineptitude has taken place in the past 24 hours, I felt the need to post.
The site that incurs my ire is none other than the Official City of Virginia Beach Website. I visited the site yesterday afternoon in order to pay for a traffic violation before today’s court hearing, which I did not want to attend. Now I don’t know about you, but if there is a way on my sites for people to give me money, I try and make it fairly obvious for them to do so. I did not see a link about traffic tickets anywhere… nor courts for that matter. I did finally notice ‘Online Payments’ hidden under a drop down menu and decided to try that, which lead to the main examples of stupid.
First off, on the payment page, the link that says “Pre-Payable Citations/Moving Violations/Traffic Tickets” does NOT take you to a place to pay. Oh no, you have to click on “Parking Tickets” to pay for any of the above. So I finally get into a payment page that asks for my ticket number, which is says should be 6 or 8 digits long. Mine is 7, but whatever, I typed it in anyway. The site proceeds to tell me that my ticket number cannot be found. Uhm.. what? So do I not have to come to court or what?
I decide that I may have typed in the wrong thing, so I adjust my number in a couple of ways to get to the 6 or 8 digit limits, all to no avail. So I start looking on the ticket for some other number that I should be typing in instead. Nothing…. So I take it to Andrew in the next cubicle and have him look at it for a different number. Nothing. So I search the website for a different page in case I am looking at the wrong payment page. Nothing.
What makes things infuriating is the error message the system gives you. “Your information that you have provided is not found in the system.” So does my ticket not exist? Is the number I typed in even valid? Am I even on the correct page for this type of ticket? Who knows? Not me, and certainly not the website.
Abandoning the web, I made a phone call to the court, where I talked to a woman in accounting who seemed to realize that the site is inadequate. According to her, the system does not allow you to pay online within five days of the court date. This may or may not be fully accurate (I saw a different limit somewhere else), but the point is this. The Internet can accept and record a payment in the span of milliseconds. They let me pay over the phone just 2 hours before my court appearance, so why can’t I do that through the website? And if not, just tell me so on the site. The site shouldn’t claim ignorance to my ticket, it should just say that the site can’t accept payments for tickets that close to the court date, and give you the number for accounting (because you call accounting, not traffic court to pay… but that’s another story).
I do not see what is so hard about making things make sense. For all the money I am sure the government put into that site, I am sure 10% could have been set aside for user testing. But I can imagine that only amateurs who do not give a damn about the users have ever been near a government site. Professionals can’t stand the stench.
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