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October 11, 2004
Renewing my driving license online: a Kafkaesque experience: Part 2
By Gerry McGovern
Action is what matters on the Web. Someone comes to your website in order to do something. The only measure of success that counts is whether they have been able to do what they came to your website to do.
In the last issue, I wrote about the difficulties I had renewing my driving license. I had printed out and filled out a form, but now I have to find out where to send it. I live in an area called Fingal, but the Fingal County Council website is broken, so I click on the Dublin City Council website, as Fingal is part of Dublin.
The first thing I see is a big picture of Dublin. It's very helpful for people living in Dublin to see nice pictures of Dublin when we want to renew our driving licenses, because otherwise we might forget where we are living. I am also informed that Ireland holds the EU presidency in 2004, which is also very important to know, even though our holding of the EU presidency finished in June 2004.
Filled with optimism, I click on the Services link. I get a nice semi-circular navigation graphic, while being informed that Dublin City Council employs 6,500 people. How useful to know this sort of thing; I must tell my children over breakfast in the morning.
I click on the Traffic and Roads link. I'm getting closer. I now see a link for Driving Licenses and I click on it. Lo and behold, I now find a telephone number I can ring. What absolute luck I have. After waiting only a couple of more minutes, I inform the person that I'm from Fingal, but that the Fingal website didn't work, and they tell me that in fact I'm lucky the Fingal website didn't work, because, in fact, it's Dublin City Council that deals with driving licenses even for people who live in Fingal. Now, why didn't I know that?
Happily, I put down the phone. I am making progress. Now I know where to send the form. Because my job involves analyzing websites, I decide to go back to the Dublin City Council website just to see what else they have on driving licenses. I see this great link:
A simple way to fill out your form
I have to click on it because I love simplicity. The print form wasn't too bad at one page long, so I'm wondering how have they managed to make it even simpler. You wouldn't believe it! Those crafty web designers have turned a 1 page form into 12 separate screens!
Incredulously, I click through the screens to see how on earth they have managed to do that, and am even more amazed when I come to screen 10, where I'm told that I now need to print out all the previous nine screens because this is not actually an online form at all, but rather a print form cleverly disguised as an online one!
Filling out my driving license online was like being caught in a world created by Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka. If Beckett had to fill out his driving license online, he might have said: "I can't go on, I won't go on, I'll go on."
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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Filling out my driving license online was like being caught in a world created by Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka.
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