Oregon replaced their unemployment system with a system called Frances. I may have reported the first email that came from Frances as spam. I also spent over an hour researching the system because I was afraid the state site had been hacked and someone put this Frances system in its place. After finding enough news coverage on the new system name and verifying the URL. It still makes me wildly uncomfortable to log onto a system for state unemployment that has the name Frances.
User Experience or Support. At minimum pick one!
Frances’ user experience is poor at best. There are templates nowadays like Squarespace to help folks navigate a 0-1 product. If you want a new UI, you can even convert your Figma to a web app. There are user journey maps to ensure you don’t miss a feature. You can try Miro, Mural, or Figma. There are SaaS out of the box, and auth out of the box. I get that those things can also be hard if you are not 0-1. Regardless of whether you are doing a refresh or building 0-1 your end user should be top of mind. If you aren’t going to do that, you had better staff up your support line and pay them well!
Getting Started with Frances
Back to Frances. To get started you need to submit a request for a letter. This letter will have a claim number that acts as your unique identifier. It takes roughly 1-2 weeks from request to get the letter. Once you get the letter you have a time limit to sign up. Yep, your claim number appears to expire if you do not use it fast enough. For any neurodivergent people like myself, this whole process is a dystopian nightmare! It’s long, tedious, and boring, nothing about the website is aesthetically pleasing. Further, there aren’t a lot of instructions or prompts.
One-time passwords aren’t one-time here
Great, time has passed and your Frances letter with your claim number arrives. The instructions are simple:
Enter the claim number
Receive a one-time password
Create a new password
Fill out forms
Pretty standard and incredibly straightforward. Similar to your real ID which requires you to verify that you are who you are, you need to verify your identity for unemployment. This is all in one system. In the screenshot below this is my view when I’m logged in.
The reasonable assumption is that you use the same username and password throughout the Frances system. I understand that having SSO out of the box is hard for A LOT of tech companies. I was fully prepared to log in to each new section of the application with my current username and password. I wasn’t prepared to be logged in and to be asked for that one-time password to verify my identity.
What happens if you do not verify your identity? Simple, your claim is denied. I have no idea what message I missed, I HAD to have missed the message that indicated that it’s critical to save my one-time password. Explaining that the one-time password is reused to verify my identity. If anyone else saw those messages, please let me know. My ADHD may have skimmed over something
Power of the User Experience
I’m not a read all the instructions before diving into an application, person. I assume and expect a good user experience. I expect the user experience for something as critical as unemployment, to be intuitive.
I haven’t been able to find where to request a new letter to get another one-time password. Do I need to start a new claim with a new one-time password? What happens to the data I currently have in the system? Is that transferred? I thought my SSN was the unique identifier.
Which means, I have to use the phone. I looked at what days are best for calling, today is one of those days. My estimated hold time is a little over 3 hours. I’m currently at 3 hrs and 20 minutes as I write this.
For folks who don’t have a computer, a stable home, or a tiny amount of savings, this is a catastrophic failure. Most folks are in this situation. We have got to do better. I know we can all get jaded when building tech but when you are responsible for building a tool that impacts whether someone has a home, eats, or gets the life-saving medication they need, you have a different level of responsibility. Make the tech as simple as possible so folks who are under duress don’t need to think about what to do next.
