Bureaucracy in Ontario: how bad UX can cost you money and time
When I moved to Canada, I was curious to learn how government services work. When you immigrate to another country, you usually need at least several years to understand how to use local government services.
There are many processes that have been designed nicely, and I will definitely talk about them in my future articles, but today I want to focus on a couple of small yet essential things. At first glance, these issues seem minor, but they significantly impact day-to-day life.
In this article, I will focus on two topics that I think have been designed against proper logic and patterns of human behaviour.
License Plate Sticker
The first use case is a license plate sticker that’s familiar to people in Canada/US. If you’re not from North America, there are several reasons why we have it here.
“When a vehicle validation sticker is invalid or missing that immediately alerts a police officer from a safe distance that there is probable cause to pull someone over — it’s an indication of potential delinquency. For example, it could mean that the vehicle is stolen, or there is an unlicensed or suspended driver behind the wheel, or there are illegal substances and/or weapons in the vehicle.” 3mcanada.ca
A sticker is usually issued for one or two years and must be placed in the corner of a license plate. This sticker has only two pieces of information: a year and a month this sticker is valid until.
I’ve been driving in Canada for the last five years, and all this time, I thought that a license plate sticker was valid until the end of a month, but I was wrong. Recently I got a fine for driving with an expired sticker.
Just imagine my surprise when the officer said my sticker is valid only till the DAY OF YOUR BIRTHDAY and not till the end of a month as you may think (and as I was thinking).
After I researched this topic a bit more, I found out (one, two, three) that not everybody is aware of this renewal date rule, mainly because it’s mentioned only once along the lines in some additional documents you receive with your sticker.
Let’s dive deeper into this issue. We have a sticker that has a month and a year on it. Why is an additional level of timing (adding your date of birth into this equation) created for this task? Why not stick with the safest concept and give people time till the end of a month? In that case, every driver is safe; they have time till the end of a month.
Nothing really will change for the government if the end date would be the last day of every month instead of the date of your birthday. As a good designer, you always need to think about how your solution will work in real life, e.g. an impact on a system if all people renew their sticker on the last week/day of every month?
Let’s think about this for a moment. If you spend a bit more time, you can create an easy system that will help people renew their sticker automatically and send them this sticker prior to its expiration date, and for people who need to pay their outstanding fees, make an online option. There are plenty of ways how to make it safe for everyone, but for sure, it will take a lot of thinking and hard work to make it work for all sides.
Thinking about system safety is good, but as designers, we should never forget about our main goal: to make people’s lives easier and stressless as much as possible. Technology should never dictate how UX should work.
In flows like this one, we should always consider a possibility of a human error and help end-users to be in the safest position possible. We all know that concept of hidden things is hard to discover. The same logic is applied here; things that must be obvious (valid till the last day of a month) are changed and hidden, among other words, on the back of a sticker document pack.
Driver’s License Renewal
This is quite a big piece of paper that you need to carry with you all the time until you receive a plastic version of it.
On the photo, you can see a block of text (highlighted in red) that gives you some additional instructions. If you read it carefully, you will notice a line that says: “To avoid replacement fees, visit or contact ServiceOntario at xxx — if you have not received your card two weeks prior to the Date of Expiry on Temporary Driver’s Licence. ”
The main question is: why do we even need to have this line? Why can’t an expiration date be our “final date” before which you have to contact ServiceOntario? Why create this additional “layer” of instructions if we already have one called “Date of Expiry”?
Also, when you receive this document, it’s usually folded in half (the blue line on the photo), so it’s problematic to discover this information during your everyday use.
I do not believe that this thing has been designed on purpose. Usually, it means that it’s been created to support the processes inside the institution instead of delivering the best experience for driver’s license holders.
On an everyday basis, people experience various problems. These types of “unexpected” things may cause additional payment of almost $100 + waiting in a line + taking half of your workday off because ServiceOntario “conveniently” works only during weekdays.
I hope the Ontario government recognizes these issues and will take action to improve the experience of these services.
