I can, on occasion, be a little disorganized. Which is why I found myself sitting down to file a tax return using the online service roughly a week before the deadline. And thus began a catalogue of utter misery punctuated by much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Great Expectations

I’m all in favour of online services. Hell, I’m a web designer & developer, it would be a little odd if I weren’t. The thing is though, I’d quite like the online services to work. I’d like them to be pleasant and informative to use. I’d like them to be well-designed and pleasing to look at. I’d like them to be quicker and more efficient than scribbling madly on thinly sliced sheets of dead tree. In short, I’d like the overall experience to be not at all reminiscent of getting a root canal from a proctologist.

Redefining Success

Did I succeed? In a word, yes. Yesterday, one day before deadline, I finally submitted my electronic return into the labyrinthine bowels of the beast. Did the online service succeed in fulfilling any of my expectations above? My answer to that would be a resounding no, especially to the last point. Rarely have I encountered such a monumental morass of poor design choices and abysmal usability.

Government Gateway to Hell

My journey began with the Government Gateway, the “centralised registration service for e-Government services in the UK”. Now, I’m not expecting a UK.gov service to allow logging in with Facebook, but even at this early stage in the process it failed miserably in terms of usability. The Government Gateway insists on auto-generating a 12-digit numeric User ID, which I had to print out on dead tree and file away for fear of losing it. Note that I don’t say “forgetting” it, because it’s a 12 digit numeric User ID which I will use maybe a couple of times a year, and if I was in any way capable of remembering such an unwieldy number at such brief acquaintance I wouldn’t be attempting to declare a meagre living as a freelance web developer; I’d be in a Las Vegas casino, counting cards. If only there were some pre-existing alphanumeric string which would serve as a unique identifier for a UK citizen when interacting with Government services – something like, I dunno, a National Insurance number.

Having gone through the digital equivalent of a cavity search I was presented with a list of services to which I could sign up, so I selected Self-Assessment and was informed that in order to activate the service I would have to wait for a PIN to be sent out by post. That’s right, more cutting-edge dead tree technology in order to use an online service.

Signing in Again

Once the PIN arrived and the service was activated, things couldn’t have been less different. Now, on signing in to the Government Gateway website, I’m presented with a list of services to which I’ve signed up – in this case, income tax self-assessment. Clicking the link leads me through to the HMRC website, to which I must sign in all over again. That’s right, not even their own Government Gateway is a trusted third-party source to authorise my login, and I’m left wondering what the earthly point is in creating the damn thing in the first place, if all it gets me is a list of links to other websites, presumably all with a single login which I’ll have to laboriously type out every time, glancing at my dead tree for reference.