Heed Not The Rolling Wave

An Argument For In-House Systems

I was recently visiting my Nan, and she was complaining that the library has changed the online system that they use to let her manage her reservations and withdrawals.“It used to be one thing, now it’s changed!” It turned out her complaint was fully justified—the way you now reserve multiple books in your wishlist is:

  1. Navigate to wishlist
  2. Select the books with checkboxes
  3. Click the reserve button
  4. Wait for the page to load (painfully slow) and kick you back out to the user profile page
  5. Return to the wish list page
  6. Scroll down far enough to see that there is now an option to select which region and library you want your reservations sent to (though your ‘home library’ and region (information the system has) are not autoselected.)
  7. Hit the save button
  8. Wait for the page to painfully slowly kick you back out to the user profile page
  9. Refresh the page (because otherwise your reservations won’t appear on your list and it looks like it didn’t work again)

Now, while all sorts of people use online library reservation systems, I suspect that the heaviest users—or at the very least, those for whom the cost of failure is highest—are the elderly and vulnerable. I think old people are, in general, better able to deal with change than they’re given credit for, but the ways in which they’re not able to deal with it are exposed nearly by this. I knew to fiddle around with stuff in certain specific ways because I understand how websites work, but most old people know how to use websites in a “press button x for result y” kind of way. If you drastically change how this works (and in such a poorly-designed way, too) they will be really badly thrown off!

For me, I think this is perhaps an argument for bringing the development of certain core aspects of internet-mediated state function away in-house. I like to imagine a world where, instead of GP surgeries paying huge amounts to companies owned by people who say stuff like this, the NHS were able to build their systems themselves. Where instead of councils paying Capita or some similar outsourcing behemoth for their online functionality, there was a digital team at the department for local government that created systems to facilitate the payment of council tax and requests for parking permits—and library reservations—and all the things that every council needs. Ideally it’d be in simple HTML.

There are possibly some aspects of state <-> citizen relations where things are sufficiently bespoke that it makes sense that one council would do things drastically differently than another, but those things really are few and far between (cf the discussion on GP surgeries rolling their own forms on the latest episode of Memhaz), and would not seem to justify using private service provision (that can be chopped and changed based on budget cycles and procurement contracts) in such a way that old ladies who want to reserve their detective novels are left baffled and frustrated. The end-users of library reservation systems should not be seen to be local government procurement and accounts departments—they should be the people who want to reserve books.