France has e-gov services! Well, on paper, where it should have stayed...

The busiest State Department in France (after the -no- Work one, needless to say) is the Health Insurance one (CPAM)who takes care of establishing people's rights to public health care and of the processing of the reimbursement requests.

A little while ago, to cut costs, the Government decided to close some of the centers where you could go to apply for a Social Security card or ask questions or submit your reimbursement requests. The remaining centers are not open full time due to the lack of man power (hu, remember they just closed centers!). To compensate, the Government decided to jump on the e-services band wagon and opened a website where people could login, access their files and see the status of the reimbursement requests they had submitted.

Sounds like a good idea, right? Well on paper, it is. However, this is a perfect case of how the poor design of a website can actually make life harder for its users and in this case turn interacting with the Health Insurance State Department an experience Kafka could have written about.

It is like if this site, highly transactional by nature since it's aimed at allowing health care insured and the government to interact and solve problems, had been consciously designed to keep the end user from getting any help. This is beyond poor usability, it is intentional sabotage or plain stupidity. Since it has been this way for a few years without any attempt to improve the efficiency of online interactions, it is probably stupidity and complacency. A hint that the situation could turn ugly for France CPAM customers is French vocabulary doesn't include words like "user centric" or "usability"...

Here are a few examples that would make any user experience specialist gasp in disbelief:

- There is no linkage between physical interactions with your local CPAM outlet and your web file: papers you submit physically or conversations you have with real people are not reflected in your intranet, and emails exchanges you have with face-less employees are invisible to the physical ones. 360 view of the customer somebody? Another concept to add to French dictionaries and minds.

- You have to use a web form to send a question to the face-less service. Fine. Except that a 1 000 characters limit makes it harder to explain your situation than to take the GMAT. It's Twitter meets Kafka. The result? The answer you get asks you for more details.

- So you submit a question online, sweating to condense it in 1 000 characters or less, and you wait on average 7 working days (vs. the 3 promised) to get an answer, via email. Chances are, the answer asks you for more details.

- The email you get are ones, so you go back to your little CPAM intranet to answer. Surprise: the email you just received is nowhere to be found. There is no email/communications archives.

- You go to the web form to answer the email you received and are now faced by a New and Bigger problem: how can you re-explain your problem, mention the email answer you received AND answer the questions it asked you in less than 1 000 characters? At this point, you are beyond sweating: you are drinking heavily. (I suspect it's part of the e-gov strategy to make you die quickly and avoid giving you retirement money, but it will be another post).

This surrealist situation can last a few months/years, during which the government can make interests on the money it owes you...

So, me, the absolute internet believer, had to actually print all my documents and go to the post office to send my file, certified mail, to the CPAM. I am not even sure this will get me anywhere as I don't have a case file number to give them, nor do they provide an address where to send inquiries.

Next time I go to their offices, I take my Flip cam with me and record the conversation!

I don't know when my problem will get resolved, but I am frustrated to see the administration misusing the web to abuse their customers. And I don't mention the potential human drama behind having to deal with the French Health Insurance Sate Government - CPAM: money problems, health issues, deaths....

In conclusion, the main risk facing e-government services is complacency:

1- The government has a monopoly and therefore no incentive to actually be efficient or helpful. After all, the "customers" are prisoner and loyal. Therefore it is easy to ignore their need and complaints.

2- Putting up a website, no matter how much worse it makes people situation, is a perfect way for the government to scale down on phone support and physical outlets, while touting that it is providing online support. I won't even ask how people with limited means/education can attempt to use this so-called support.

3- It would be about time the French Government, and France at large, "get" how online services work and recognize that building a website "experience" requires special skills and processes. It takes a little more than a sudo art director and a developer. Or you may just wait for the next revolution to wake up!

The French are known to be too bored to be concerned with any kind of efficiency but come on, we are talking about Health Insurance concerns and money. It is just a shame to use the web as a way to avoid making payments and deflect any kind of accountability. Without mentioning that most people will probably just blame the tool, the web, not the government and that will allow this vicious circle to go on.