The Politics and Usability of Unemployment Insurance Websites
TLDR
For my capstone project in college, I analyzed the usability of all 50 states’ unemployment insurance websites. I was particularly interested in what made one state’s website better than another’s. The factors I considered were the state’s political ideology, historical political party control, racial makeup, and income.
In the end, I found that states with more Republican voters in the 2020 election tended to have less usable websites. The same was true for race. States that had a greater percentage of minority groups also had websites with more usability problems. Notably, there was still a lot of unexplained variance (R squared = 0.19), meaning that the variables I looked at weren’t a perfect explanation of why one state had a better website than another’s.
Why usability matters
Poor usability hinders people from getting what they want. In the context of government services like unemployment insurance, poor usability prevents people from successfully applying for government help they may desperately need. In the end, poor usability hurts people.
As most government services are either completely online already or rapidly moving there, it is critically important that their websites are usable. People should not be burdened with usability problems as they try to receive money to keep the lights on and feed their kids.
Findings
Overall states did pretty well. The average usability score was 82.6 out of 100 (standard deviation = 10.6). But, some certainly did better than others.
A quick scan of the table above and the chart below suggests some relationship between politics and usability. The highest scoring websites are mostly Democratic states and the lowest are mostly Republican states.
I used multiple OLS regression and found that a state’s political beliefs appear to be related to its website’s usability, controlling for state income and racial makeup.
To understand what usability looks like for unemployment insurance websites, here are some examples.
Good usability
Minnesota had the highest usability score of all the states. A major reason it did so well was its effective headers, navigational tools, and information architecture.
When users first arrive at Minnesota’s unemployment insurance site (below), the page makes it obvious what’s intended for them. As most users will be applicants looking for information on the application process, a division like this is great since it avoids exposing users to unnecessary information like employer tax information.
Additionally, once users get onto a page, they can easily tell where they are (header), how they got there (breadcrumbs), and where they can go (navigation bar).
Rhode Island’s website was also highly usable. I was particularly impressed by its accessibility settings, letting a user customize their website to their exact needs.
Bad usability
Nevada’s website is a great example of what frequently went wrong for the lowest scorers. The homepage (below) isn’t as easy to scan as other homepages since the content isn’t particularly well chunked into sections. The “I want to” and “Help and resources” sections have a lot of overlap.
Additionally, all the important information is buried inside long PDFs. PDFs are not as easy to navigate and search through as standard web pages. Someone looking for information on benefit amounts may need to go through multiple 50+ page PDFs to find the one piece of information they need. Also, Nevada’s website doesn’t have a search function! Good luck finding what you need!
Wyoming’s website also scored poorly. Its homepage (below) illustrates how many websites failed to clearly present key unemployment information. Information like how to apply, benefits amounts, and eligibility rules should be at the very top of a homepage, not all the way at the bottom. Sorry for the scrolling… this was just how long their page was!
Thanks for reading! This article is a shortened version of my thesis. You can read the whole thing below:
