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Oh Lord. what is wrong with the people in the City’s IT department? First they switch from a perfectly functional and easy-to-use online system for ‘Permit and Case Research’ to something called Accella Citizen Access.
This was about 10 giant steps backwards in accessibility, as finding information is now a protracted game of ‘hide and seek.’ Among other deficiencies, you must actually know which Code Enforcement division your property/case number may fall under (such as Health Dept, Permits, etc). Until you sort that out, they can only tell you that there was no case found. Mind you, all their case numbers are unique, regardless of what entity issued it. And you can’t search on an approximate address anymore.
And yesterday, they foisted another ‘gem’ of malfeasance upon us. They have replaced the simple, one-step Mayor’s Action Center form with an absolutely arcane and bewildering mess they’ve labelled ‘IndyRequest.’ What used to be a 30 second operation now takes several minutes. Assuming you can successfully get through the whole process.
This is an Adobe Flash based website. Flash, you may or may not know, is something that Apple detests and refuses to incorporate support for into their iPhone and iPad (which are only about the most sought after internet devices at this writing!) so anyone with these devices CANNOT access the new website.
Not only that, but what used to be a 2-3 click process is now a minimum of SIX steps. They tout their ‘improved’ way of specifying addresses, telling us you no longer need to know the exact address because they let you mark the location on their integrated map. And the map complains you haven’t zoomed in enough (you need to be at the ‘third tick’, whatever that may be) forcing you to abort and start all over. It conveniently tells you all your work up to that point will be lost. Gee, thanks.
Fine. Now they have a map that tells you ‘that address can’t be found’ instead of a MAC person doing that. You cannot mark something at an intersection. Their system doesn’t know the address of an intersection. Just brilliant.
You must traverse a sequence of 6 major steps, within which there are multiple other choices you need to make in order to find the correct place to file your complaint. Again, like with Accella, the user has to figure out what department they need to send a complaint to. Lotsa luck on that.
But this should ease the load on the Mayor’s Action Center, because people will become frustrated and give up without getting all the way through it.
And I could not find any choice that allowed me to submit a complaint about their horrible software. Sigh…
Tags: 2 Comments
2 responses so far ↓
I tried working all this myself without using this post as a guide.
It didn’t go over too well.
I don’t see what the obsession is with JAVA based applications. They look fancy, but most of them don’t accomplish anything more than a text fill-in form (like this comment) would
For a page that HAS to assume the fuill gamut of possible users, from techheads to technophobes, this is highly inappropriate. As the saying goes, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. The curse of ‘Web 2.0′ is that it easily becomes mostly a fulfilling exercise for the developer – who accomplishes something artful and pretty but which everyone else hates. Sort of the ‘world’s best baby’ scenario. Everyone thinks THEIR kid is the cutest, prettiest, smartest, no matter what the reality is.
Slick presentation teams with well-rehearsed examples and lively banter can sell a product no matter how awful it may be.
In this situation, there was absolutely no need to change. Maybe they need the data fed into some other backend system, but they did not need to clog up the frontend. Unless of course, as I alluded, they just want to drive people away from submitting things to MAC.
I’d like to know who developed the new system, who they are connected to and most of all, why are we spending money on stuff like this right now when at every turn we seem to be short on cash.