My father has recently had surgery that led to a few complications, such that he needs some additional help at home. His level of comfort with websites is reasonably small - last year, when I suggested that he might buy me a gift voucher from Etsy as a Christmas present led to his declaring that he never wanted to visit Etsy's website again.
So I offered to put in a request for an ACAT assessment in order that he might get some additional help at home, or at least get put on the waitlist for a package.
So far, so good. I did the right thing and declared that I was completing the application form on behalf of my father, rather than completing the form as my father. I was contacted to advise that Dad would need to give his authorisation to the Department of Health and Aged Care for me to act on his behalf in this way. This seems entirely reasonable, so I downloaded the PDF form to record his agreement, completed the form, and arranged for him to sign in the right places, after reading the form's contents.
No problem so far. I scanned the form as a PDF and uploaded it into the My Aged Care portal, which sits behind the myGov portal. This generated an error message to indicate that file uploads could be no greater than 5 MB in size. Fair enough. Try as I might, however, I could not get the PDF file to be less than 5 MB in size. I deleted the instruction pages, keeping only the pages that had actual content needed for this authorisation, with no luck. So I tried another approach to export to PDF document in another format - this time, a PNG file. Success! The resulting file was under 5 MB in size and uploaded successfully with no error. My job was done.
Or so I thought. The following day I had a phone call from the Department of Health and Aged Care. The person on the other end of the phone line advised that they couldn't open my PNG files - they could only open JPEG and PDF files. OK. Back to the drawing board. I'll export each page of the form as a JPEG file and upload multiple files. So that's what I did. The resulting files were under 5 MB in size and uploaded successfully with no error. My job was done.
Or so I thought (again). The following day I had another phone call from the Department of Health and Aged Care. The different person on the other end of the phone line advised that they couldn't open my JPEG files - they could only open PDF files. OK. Back to the drawing board. I'll export each page of the form as a PDF file and upload multiple files. So that's what I did. The resulting files were under 5 MB in size and uploaded successfully with no error. My job was done.
I expressed more than little frustration at the second person who rang from the Department of Health and Aged Care - not her fault or responsibility obviously that their web portal has more than few user interface issues - but I suggested she convey the following feedback to the department's web developers:
- I am an IT consultant and I had difficulties navigating the file upload process. How on earth do people in their target demographic (people over 65 years of age) cope with this website, particularly people in the upper end of this demographic cohort?
- File sizes of 5 MB are too small. I get that you need to put some constraints on the file sizes that people can upload, but perhaps the department needs to pay AWS a bit more money for file storage and allow uploads to 10 MB.
- There is no indication about allowable file types on the web page itself. I was completely unaware that they couldn't read PNG or JPEG files until they phoned me. At a minimum, the web page should indicate what types of files are acceptable.
- Better still, the web page should not allow users to upload files types that are not acceptable. This has security implications as well, particularly if the web page is allowing executable (EXE) files to be uploaded. (I was tempted to try this to prove a point, but didn't.)
- Finally, the web page should not require me to provide the name of the uploaded file in addition to uploading the file, i.e. you've got the uploaded file, why do I need to tell you what it is called?
Good website design is not (or shouldn't be) a mystery anymore. The federal government with the assistance of its own Digital Transformation Agency should be leading the way in user experience (UX) design with departmental portals that sit behind the myGov portal, e.g. the ATO, Centrelink, My Aged Care, the NDIS, and especially those portals where users are likely to have accessibility needs or user interface requirements that are greater than those of the average user. Instead, we have a mish-mash of portals that look completely different despite serving similar needs, e.g. My Aged Care and the NDIS, where user experience is so poor that posting the form was looking like a better option than persevering with upload.