Dublin City Council Fail
August 17, 2009 at 9:22 am
I tried to pay my bin charges online. Overall a crappy user experience.
The back of my bill says to go to Dublin City.ie and select online payments. Apart from the fact that there are browser issues going on, making content get hidden behind a navigation column, the online payment button is hidden:
Shimmy on over to Dublin City Council home page and have a look. Can you see it? No?
I couldn’t either.
It’s located under top 10 content, under online services, it’s a blue link that’s not highlighted. So obviously the council don’t think it’s very important. Or maybe more people are interested in ‘careers in Dublin City Council’ which appears to be the second most important thing on the site, judging by its position on the right hand nav bar.
I did a search. [Search works] But more problems arose when I tried to pay online. Which would you choose from the following list?
I chose Environmental Waste Charges. But I was wrong.
Then I chose Other Payments. This is where the real dumbness starts. The service and item dropdown boxes don’t work. They have nothing in them. So this entire form is a waste of time.
So how do I pay online?
I don’t. I have to telephone Dublin City Council. I’ve done that before and run into problems trying to pay with Laser. They can’t accept it over the phone for some reason.
This is crap. We have a large highly funded council that moans about people not paying their bin charges. I’m a good citizen trying to pay my way and they make it so bloody difficult! I’m very surprised about this as I know that Dublin City Council is a client of IQ Content – the usability experts. I’d love to hear from someone at IQ why they made the decision to hide online payments on the site. The other errors are obviously programming and I think the internal IT team who looks after the site at Dublin City Council can put their hand up for that.
