Written by Lisa Colletti
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic not only rapidly introduced new use cases for User Experience (UX) designers to accommodate, but it has also led to an unprecedented level of burnout that can affect user interaction with websites. We make our websites more accessible by following WCAG guidelines and ensuring full functionality on mobile devices to accommodate the “mobile first” trend of internet use, but we can make them more fully open to the needs of constituents by designing web interfaces with burnout in mind.
Design library Lines of Communication highlights that “Burnout’s growing impact on users could very well change our understanding of them and our design decisions about what they need right now.” Consideration of these changes certainly extends to public-facing government portals that users turn to for information and completing processes such as filing taxes and applying for pandemic recovery programs.
It is time to think about the effects of user stress and burnout on accessibility of public-facing government systems.
In a recent Healthline article, Dr. Michael Wetter of the UCLA Medical Center asserts that “all people, regardless of profession, are subject to decision fatigue,” and the COVID-19 pandemic has produced an unprecedented number of stressors relating to economic, health, political, and family concerns.
Decision fatigue is a particular problem in a worldwide pandemic; not only are the decisions required in the space of one day increased exponentially in number, but Americans are making them based on scarce information and rapidly shifting data sets. At the same time, these decisions are also likely to have much heavier impacts. A choice as simple as whether or when to go to the grocery store can have life-and-death implications. Dr. Rashmi Paramar, a psychiatrist quoted in Healthline, reports that frequently making these serious decisions can lead to “burnout earlier than anticipated in the day, further causing reduced functioning.”
A 2020 study published in Current Biology measuring participants’ ability to navigate a fictional city layout under various stress levels (Brown, Gagnon, and Wagner) found that stress disrupts memory and planning functions of the brain.
In the current environment, stressors are also omnipresent. According to the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory, a tool designed to identify stressful life events and their potential effects on health, a married woman who experiences pandemic layoff, has family members move in leading to increased arguing, and adjusting to standard pandemic changes like masking and more frequent handwashing earns a score of 344, which denotes the highest level of risk: an 80% chance of experiencing a stress-related health problem within the next two years. Even a professional who experiences no layoff, receives a promotion, and must simply discontinue weekly dinner parties and pottery class due to a pandemic earns a score of 174, well above the “normal” threshold of 150.
Burnout-informed UX design can include qualities that reduce frustration and streamline processes such as simple navigation, intuitive organization of information, and options for initiating processes with a low up-front investment of time and mental energy. For example, an agency could offer a full map of the process from start to finish and a list of all documentation that will be needed, prior to requiring user registration and login to complete an online application through a public-facing system.
Further research is needed to identify design adjustments that can reliably offset the effects of burnout for constituents using government systems. With citizens pushed to their mental and emotional limits, it is the right time to address the needs of a populace collectively experiencing some level of burnout. Improved public-facing website design can help your agency to achieve your mission with empathy and new creativity emerging from shared challenges and a vision of a better future.
