Design, without UX

I recently had to renew my driver's license at the DMV. After two renewals by mail, they want you to go in person. Probably to get an updated picture (we do age quite a bit in 15 years!) and ensure that you are indeed the real person. Good news is that you can make an appointment online ahead of time, and to some extent, choose a date and time that would work for you (lip biting... the interface could use some work).

So I went to the DMV on the appointed date and at the appointed time. The line and wait time for appointments were short enough. Go up to the counter, show the paperwork, pay, get fingerprinted, verify that my information is correct, take a picture. Same old, same old. Actually, the person taking the picture was kind enough to show me that I looked decent on the photo. Great! I'll look for my new driver's license in the mail. One thing off my to-do list. Ah, not so fast... My new card came in the mail sooner than I expected - nice... but my name was incorrect! How did that happen if they asked me to review my name before I left the DMV? I usually double- and triple-check these things...

Little did I know that the California driver's license had a new look! It debuted in the fall of 2010, so it's 5 years old already. Maybe it was advertised heavily back then. I wasn't paying much attention to the news - my mistake. Must have been a few months after I last renewed my license. The new card design is meant to make it harder to fake IDs. To their credit, the layout now shows the last name and "first name" (and middle name, really) on separate lines. But there are several problems with that.

First, first names and last names were apparently not previously saved separately in the DMV system. While it's good that they've been rectifying that since, it's not so good in the way that they assume that everyone's last name is a single word. Mine isn't. Thus, my new driver's license had split my last name and had the last part on the last name line and the first part at the end of the first name line. Second, what I saw was not what I got. When they asked me to verify my driver's license information at the DMV counter, the printed sheet of paper showed my full name on a single line as it was on the old driver's license, which I approved, of course. Third, they did not communicate the change to me, at least not at the time when I would have needed to be aware of it.

After some digging around, I found a DMV page that shows the new driver's license design. I have no idea how to get there other than via the google search results. It would have been nice to see the information when I went to the DMV website to make the appointment or read up on online renewal. Or when I went to the DMV in person. A poster could have done the trick. The DMV website also has a trifold about the new driver's license design. Again, no idea how to get there within the DMV website. Found it via google. It would have been nice to receive the trifold in the mail. Costs too much? How about a link on the renewal paperwork to the online PDF? Maybe they did plenty of advertisement when the new design first came out. Still, surely they must know that it's the first time I would be getting the new license design.

Had I been aware, I would have known to tell the DMV clerk that my last name was made of two words and to ensure that it printed correctly. I would have known because I wasn't born with this last name yesterday. I've been through lots of situations with it already over the years. In college, I've had to look for my mail under different letters of the alphabet. If the conference check-in desk couldn't find my badge, or the dental assistant couldn't find my file (back in the day when it was all manual), I'd ask them to look under another letter. There are even online forms that tell me that my name cannot contain a space! I've had credit cards that came with a hyphen where there should be none. And no, my last name isn't a combination of two last names without the hyphen. It's cultural (maybe a story for another day). And there are many other cultures where last names contain two or more, sometimes many more, words.

If Ima's last name had been Card Holder instead of Cardholder, she could have had some pains with the new card format too.

Source: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/e090f7ec-64bc-4e87-afc8-e66895903b37/dl627e.pdf?MOD=AJPERES

How did it end? Sadly, not well for me. I made another appointment online, took more time off work, drove myself to the DMV a second time... only to find out that they wouldn't take my word for it and needed to see the original of my birth certificate or passport (duh, why didn't I think of it?). An electronic copy wouldn't do. I get it, they need to prevent fraud. All right, take three... This time, the officer made the appointment for me. Took yet more time off work, drove myself to the same DMV office a third time. I had to get fingerprinted again. Ok, sure, they need to ensure that I'm the real me. I had to have another picture taken - that, I really don't get why. People who renew by mail or online get to reuse their picture from 10 years ago. I had mine taken just a few days ago. Anyway, as unprepared for a photo as I was, I went with it. I had told the officer that I quite liked the previous picture and wasn't prepared this time (more mentally than anything, after all the hassle). She then told me that she thought this new picture looked better than the one from a few days ago. For some reason, she couldn't show me the screen. She had to submit the picture and print it on paper to show me (poor tree). OMG! My eyes were half closed! (She's not quite to blame, I blink a lot, but what was she thinking?). By that point, she could no longer recall the picture because she had already submitted it. DMV employees are not empowered to offer the best service they could (this is not zappos). I would have to pay another $27 or so to get a new picture taken. But I had already put up with enough "for free" that I wasn't about to throw more money at the system to go through these pains again. Please just don't ask to see my driver's license...

The biggest issue that could have avoided all this is that when they designed the new driver's license card, they did not think through the user experience. They did not strive to understand the users. Not all are American. What do their names look like? They're having to take time out of their busy lives to come do this in person. Maybe they need to drag kids along. Or maybe they need to pay a sitter to be able to come in person to do this. How do we make this experience (wait, make that process - we're talking DMV here) as painless as possible for them? They did not think of all the touch points. They probably did not observe the process in action. Had they thought through the end to end experience and done due diligence, they would have realized that they needed to also change the layout of the interim paper driver's license or confirmation sheet at the least. If the layout matched, if I saw what I was going to get in the mail, I would have caught the issue much earlier in the process. I wouldn't have had to go to the DMV three times. The DMV wouldn't have had to print my driver's license twice. They wouldn't have had to mail it to me twice. Some trees would be saved, maybe. The driver's license in my hand wouldn't have a mugshot on it. After 5 years, did no one catch this? If my comment card ended up where it should, they should know better now.

Unfortunately, for now, to me at least, the DMV remains the poster child for bureaucracy and inefficiencies.