New immigration Web site sucks

http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/11 ... ite-sucks/

By Michael Hampton
November 3

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, that part of the government responsible for preventing people from immigrating to the U.S., rolled out a redesigned Web site Wednesday. And the new site sucks.

The site, which took over a year for Merlin International to build for the agency, looks similar to the newly redesigned Department of Homeland Security Web site, which the department rolled out two weeks ago, and which also sucks, but for somewhat different reasons.

Before I get into taking the site apart, let’s hear what the government bureaucrats responsible for this waste of money have to say for themselves.

“With the launch of the new Web Portal, visitors will find the in-demand information they need within a sleek, modern framework,” said USCIS director Emilio Gonzalez. “You’re going to like the updated Web Portal, it’s a giant step forward for our agency and a helpful new tool for our applicants.”

Let’s just see about that.

A brief technical review of the new USCIS Web site shows numerous problems with the site which will cause problems for Web users, both now and in the future.

The first thing I looked at was under the hood, to see if the site adhered to various Web standards. And I was quite surprised to find that the whole site was laid out using tables, a 1990’s era practice, instead of the more modern Cascading Style Sheets. The new DHS Web site at least came into the 21st century in that respect; it uses CSS.

The new site also changed all of its URLs (page addresses) and of course the old ones are now broken. DHS learned about this two weeks ago after a large outcry from annoyed webmasters and reluctantly agreed to redirect some of the old URLs after it rolled out its new Web site. The problem at the USCIS site is the new URLs themselves suck. They’re horribly long and contain nothing but complete garbage. As a webmaster they’re so bad I don’t even want to link to them. To be fair, a few of the URLs, such as for various PDF files, seem to be okay.

And then there’s searching for information on the site.

“The new site is easier to navigate, visitors can use the built-in search engine to easily locate needed information and can find answers to their immigration questions through the interactive ‘How Do I…?’ page,” says a USCIS news release. (PDF)

So I ran a couple of searches. They seemed to bring up the right information, but the page said “Displaying results 1-8″ and I only saw five results. Then I realized the search results page was in a frame! This made navigation much more difficult.

Then there’s the little issue of keeping people up to date. USCIS’ idea of how to do this is apparently by using e-mail. “USCIS is partnering with a commercial provider to automatically track changes to the website and send out e-mail alerts to subscribers,” according to a USCIS fact sheet. (PDF) I remember signing up for such services in 1995. While e-mail notification is still quite useful for people with old computers, the 21st century way of notifying people of site updates is through Really Simple Syndication (RSS). A few government agencies have started using RSS, but notably, not DHS or its agencies (except FEMA, but they still think of themselves as separate from DHS).

Not only was this site redesign a waste of money, I suspect that USCIS got ripped off, and that means you, the taxpayer, got ripped off. That same fact sheet also says with a straight face, “This new design and architecture was based on the latest research on how people use websites and find information in the most effective way possible.” I have no doubt that that’s what the contractor said, but I just don’t see it.

All in all, the visual refresh is nice, even if poorly executed, though I suspect most of the 135,000 daily users that USCIS claims are going to leave the site more confused than when they arrived. After all, it turns out, the process of immigrating to the U.S. is arduous and Byzantine, and for people from some countries, virtually impossible. It desperately needs to be simplified. A new Web site can’t do that; it needs an act of Congress.