Chapter 1 of 8 · A day with the online state~2 minutes
Four tasks, four websites, four ways of doing the same thing
A scenario put together from common problems. It does not describe any particular website.
Ana is 34. She has recently moved to another city and has a few things to sort out with the state. She has decided to do them online, in a single evening.
The first website: booking an appointment for an identity card.
The menu is at the top. The submit button is at the bottom, on the right. When she gets one digit of her CNP (Romanian personal numeric code) wrong, a red message appears: “Error”. It does not say which digit, or what to do.
The second website: property tax on her home.
The menu is on the left. The form is a PDF that she has to print, fill in by hand and scan. She does not know whether the page is up to date, because nowhere does it say when it was last updated.
The third website: a certificate from the town hall.
Her address does not fit in the fields: there is no space for the block, entrance and flat number. Only after she sends the application does she find out that another document was needed.
The fourth website: a form for her mother.
Her mother has poor eyesight and uses a screen reader, a program that reads aloud what is on the page. On the website, the buttons have no names. The program just says “button, button, button”.
Many of these problems look small from a technical point of view. For the person who runs into them, though, some can make the service impossible to use. Together, they mean wasted time, trips to the counter and people who give up.
And Ana is lucky: she uses the internet every day, she sees well and she speaks Romanian. For many other people, the same services are even harder to use.
For specialists
The scenario illustrates documented problems:
- Unspecific error messages, unlabelled fields, no semantic structure. These are among the most common problems found by the Romanian Authority for Digitalisation (ADR), the government agency for digitalisation, in its 2025 monitoring.
- No date of last update. Showing it on every page is mandatory under Government Decision (HG) no. 1085/2003, art. 6¹, on pain of a fine of 5,000–10,000 lei.
- Forms that cannot handle Romanian addresses (block, entrance, flat, SIRUTA code, the official code of each Romanian locality) or addresses abroad. My proposal, the Government of Romania Design System (SDGR), deals with them through a dedicated pattern.
- Information about the documents needed given only at the end. Regulation (EU) 2018/1724 on the single digital gateway requires clear information before the procedure starts. The SDGR proposal deals with this through the “Before you start” pattern.
What I base this on
The links lead to the public versions of my research documents; the section number (§) takes you straight to the paragraph cited.
| Claim | Document | Where |
|---|---|---|
| The common problems found by ADR (invisible focus, contrast, unlabelled fields, images without alternative text, no structure) | What already exists in Romania | §6 |
| Date of last update, mandatory on every page | What already exists in Romania | §5.2 |
| The patterns for address, CNP, “Before you start” | The full proposal | §6.5 |
| Regulation (EU) 2018/1724, information before the procedure | European rules | Part B, B2 |
| Interfaces that differ from one institution to another | The full proposal | §1.1 |