Website design is more than just pretty graphics and cogent text: It should ensure that even fools like JOHN HARRIS can use them successfully.

Last week I spent more than an hour completing WorkCover’s online reconciliation form – and I still got it wrong.

Though some would attribute this digital ineptitude to fading mental acuity or an impatient temperament, of course, I blame the website.

For years, I’ve used the www.workcover.com/reconcile website to report and pay the WorkCover levy for my business because it was easier than filling in the paper form.

Unfortunately, WorkCover has redesigned this online system: Now it is more bewildering than the Liberal Party’s document management policy.

Fortunately, WorkCover has wonderfully helpful people at its call centre: I should know because I became a frequent caller in the course of fouling up my online reconciliation.

One even kindly helped to correct this error.

However, an online workflow system should actually reduce demand for the call centre rather than increase it.

My WorkCover woes put me in mind of a book called Nudge, which suggests that people make better decisions if you design the choices well.

The authors, a pair of economists, coin the term “choice architecture” for designing how a system guides people through the decision-making process.

A telling point in the book is that “a well designed system expects its users to err and is as forgiving as possible”.

WorkCover’s online reconciliation process neither expects people to err nor is it forgiving – unless you like phoning its call centre.

The WorkCover website has suffers from the “camel complex” – that is, it’s a horse designed by a committee.

Frustratingly, the site has everything it needs to assist users, including an animated demo of how to use it, interactive forms that help calculate the levy and an online payment system.

The problem is that the way it is put together makes it confusing to use for infrequent, or impatient, users.

So here are three suggestions to make the WorkCover site easier to use.

1. Make the levy calculation form, which gathers payroll data, part of the reporting process to reduce the need for interpreting instructions
2. Place the 2009 reporting line above the 2010 estimates line with simple explanatory headings for each
3. Allow online amendments to a WorkCover levy report up until its due date, just to account for fools like me.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia www.johnharris.net.au

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