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October 04, 2004
Renewing my driving license online in 50 tortuous steps: Part 1
By Gerry McGovern
The best websites make our lives easier, while the worst ones make our lives more difficult. After trying to renew my driving license online, I was stunned by how awful some websites still are. Much of the Web is a quagmire of appalling design and even worse management.
I had two basic choices in renewing my driving license. Firstly, I could have gone the manual service route and rang around, locating someone who would post me out the appropriate form. Secondly, I could have gone the self-service route, and gone on the Web to find and hopefully fill out the form online.
Because I'm a web professional, I chose the Web. However, as an average citizen, my choice between manual service and web self-service would be based on these factors: convenience, speed, simplicity, ease-of-use. The experience I had on the Web was inconvenient, slow, complex, difficult to use, and in the end I still had to pick up the phone.
I started off my journey at Oasis, a central resource for Irish citizens. The content was well written, and I quickly found the section I needed. There was a link that said:
"Download and complete application form D.401 (pdf)."
I was about to click on it when I also read:
"Please check with your local Motor Tax Office that they accept applications on downloaded application forms."
Hello? So, I go to the Web, search, find this page on driving licenses, and before I can download the form I have to ring up my Motor Tax Office to see if they'll actually accept such a form downloaded from the Web.
If I rang the Motor Tax Office in the first place and just asked them to send me out a form (the manual service choice), wouldn't that have been much simpler? Because if I ring them now, they probably won't know offhand whether or not they can accept forms downloaded from the Web, and they'll have to talk to someone else, and that will waste even more time.
Basically, I decide to download the form and take my chances. I print it out. It looks horrible. Someone did a quick 'n' dirty scan of the original and saved it as a PDF, because they just didn't have time to do the job properly. I start filling out the form but I can hardly read some of the questions. I persevere, hoping that they'll accept it.
After filling out the form, I now need to find out where to send it. The Oasis website tells me that my nearest Motor Tax Office is based in my local authority. I get to a page with a list of local authority links. I find out that local authorities are actually called councils.
Which council should I choose? I live in Swords, which happens to be part of Fingal County Council. There are 32 counties in the island of Ireland, and Fingal is not one of them. It is an invention of government that the average citizen does not relate to. I click on the Fingal link. I get an error message. Obviously, the Web feels that Fingal as a county shouldn't exist either. So, I check the next best thing, which is Dublin City Council. (Swords is actually part of County Dublin.)
Next week: the saga continues
Gerry McGovern
You are welcome to republish this article once you place the following text and link at the end of the article:
Gerry McGovern is a web content management author and consultant
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