Still having trouble with the NC unemployment website? There’s good news and bad news
North Carolina’s unemployment website is so slow on mobile devices that it’s almost off the charts that one tech group is using to rank all 50 states.
Hundreds of thousands of people in North Carolina — more than a tenth of the workforce — are now out of work because of the coronavirus pandemic. And many have reported major glitches with the unemployment website that are preventing them from filing for benefits. Those problems are then compounded by difficulties reaching any unemployment office staffer by phone.
“We can’t call, we can’t go in person — all we’ve got is that website,” said Mark Barroso of Pittsboro, who’s out of work due to coronavirus. “It’s horrible. It’s like the early days of Obamacare, it’s that bad.”
The 2013 rollout of the Obamacare website, healthcare.gov, was widely panned for being so clunky that only six people were able to apply on the first day.
“The computer, you can try 20 times a day and maybe get through to see your claim,” said Joe Edward, a recently unemployed Cary man. “But the claim, when finally submitted, is not being processed, and you cannot ask a question over the internet.”
Last Friday, state officials announced they’d doubled staffing at the unemployment office and plan to triple it by the end of this week. That will help with some problems, particularly the deluge of phone calls.
However, a report published last week by the Washington, D.C.-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that in North Carolina — and most other states — the problems go beyond just staffing.
North Carolina officials disputed some of the specific claims in the report. However, they did tell The News & Observer that they’ve put several fixes into place and will continue looking for ways to improve.
There are major shortcomings in most state unemployment websites, the report concluded, even though the fixes should be relatively simple to handle.
The desktop version of North Carolina’s website is slower than most other modern websites, said the report group’s vice president, Daniel Castro, in interviews with The News & Observer.
And the mobile version of the website, he said, shouldn’t even be described as “bad” but as “tragic.”
While the mobile site deserves credit for having a good design, he said, it’s incredibly slow by modern standards. And that could lead to people either being unable to fill out their application or quitting in frustration.
‘The state hasn’t fixed them’
On a scale of 1-100, where 50 is considered the cutoff for being slow, North Carolina’s mobile unemployment site scored only a 7 on the ITIF’s test.
That’s the site that anyone trying to apply for benefits with a phone or tablet would use.
Only six other states, including South Carolina, had worse mobile scores.
“This low of a score is the result of specific coding problems that the state should be able to fix,” Castro said. “The fact that the state hasn’t fixed them suggests they are not paying enough attention to these issues.”
State officials disagree. They ran their own tests “using similar tools,” said David Rhoades, a spokesman for the N.C. Department of Commerce, after The News & Observer started asking questions last week.
They found that the mobile site’s speed came in at 53 on the 1-100 scale, not 7.
The state has already made some improvements since the coronavirus job losses began rolling in, Rhoades said, like upgrading their servers to handle the increase in traffic. And IT officials are looking at other potential solutions.
Some of the other changes they’ve already made have been small, but important, tweaks.
One large source of frustration had been that people who put in a wrong password used to have to call the unemployment office to reset it. But then officials had the IT staff change that, to just let people keep trying their password.
That saved people hours, if not days, of waiting to get back into their accounts.
The unemployment office has also been the subject of much criticism by people who said they’ve tried to call and don’t even get put on hold, but are just hung up on automatically.
However, that should improve now that Amazon — which runs the cloud server the unemployment office uses for its phone system — has said it will let the state keep more calls on hold.
“We’ve just got authorization this morning that they’re going to expand that ... and not cut anybody off,” said Lockhart Taylor, the head of the unemployment office, at a state legislative meeting Tuesday. “There’s just no worse customer service you can provide someone than to have them cut off.”
In another change, the office’s phone lines have also only been open on weekdays — but there should be new weekend hours starting this Saturday, Taylor told lawmakers Tuesday. However, he didn’t give details like what the Saturday hours would be or if this would be a permanent change, and the unemployment office’s communications team hasn’t responded to the N&O’s request for those details.
Record-breaking job losses
While the state usually gets around 3,000 new unemployment claims a week, the post-coronavirus numbers have been averaging more than 20,000 new claims every day.
More than 700,000 people have filed for unemployment since mid-March. That represents a massive strain on the system. Even during the Great Recession a decade ago, officials have said, the jobless claims peaked at 100,000 a month.
“Having said this, we understand additional improvements can probably be made to the site’s code base to decrease latency issues and help people apply for benefits as quickly as possible,” Rhoades said.
Another finding in the ITIF report was that North Carolina’s website failed a test for accessibility. In other words, people with a disability, particularly involving their eyesight, might have a hard time applying for benefits.
“The irony is that it usually does not cost more to do it right, it just requires someone to be paying attention,” Castro said. “We hope that our report reminds more states to pay attention.
Rhoades said that while the report did raise some individual issues on accessibility that the state is looking into, he disputed the overall assumption that the website isn’t accessible.
“The site was built with accessibility in mind,” he wrote in an email, linking to the state government’s webpage on accessibility. “ And (state-run) tests found the site performed well on this measure, but this is an area we are continually looking to improve on over time.”
Ahead of the curve on the cloud
One thing that the ITIF researchers and state officials agree on is that North Carolina deserves credit for having a well-designed website that helps people find the information they need. It received nearly a perfect score on the report in that category, beating almost every state.
North Carolina also deserves credit for using the cloud for its website, both Castro and Rhoades told The N&O.
While North Carolina has had its share of problems, Castro said, the scope of the problems are nowhere near what states like New Jersey or Florida are facing, with relatively ancient technology.
A recent article from McClatchy DC found that in Florida, the unemployment website runs on “dated technology that leaves the newly jobless trying to paddle a canoe against a tsunami.”
Most modern websites do already run on the cloud, at least in the private sector, Castro said. But outside of North Carolina, he said, many state governments have still not embraced the new technology.
“From what we’ve seen government’s lagging a lot actually,” Castro said. “It’s hard to say that puts North Carolina in the top 10%, or top 20%, but they definitely are doing the right thing.”
Rhoades said that while North Carolina is experiencing record demand for unemployment benefits right now, that decision “has delivered a huge benefit in terms of allowing us to handle the unprecedented new demand on the system.”
This story was originally published April 22, 2020 at 1:42 PM.
