Unnecessary Confusion

The MyGov and Centrelink websites are really bad. They're confusing and inconvenient. For example, you know how on every website ever, you've always been able to enter your username, press Tab, then enter your password and hit Enter rather than clicking on each text field and then the login button? On the MyGov site, you have to click on the username field first. It's not automatically selected. Then after entering your username, you have to hit Tab three times to get to the password field. One press takes you to the "forgot username" link. There can be no good reason for this. They just set the tab stops in the incorrect order and don't care to fix it. But that's not the main thing I want to talk about today.

When you're receiving the jobseeker payment, you have to report your income every two weeks. It's a stupid waste of time but at least it doesn't take long. But take a look at the screenshot above. That's what you see after you submit your report and click the button (circled in green) to go back to the main page. You've got your confirmation (circled in blue) that the report has been submitted, so you're done. Why then does it pop up a warning telling you that you're attempting to cancel something and that no information will be saved?

It's incorrect, by the way. The report has been submitted, as it says it has. Nothing will be lost if you leave this screen. But the first time you see it, you are almost certainly going to think that you need to do something else to finalise your report, right? It wouldn't warn you not to cancel if the process was already complete and impossible to cancel, would it?

Then have a look at the text of that warning (underlined in red) and the two buttons below it (circled in pink). It's asking you to confirm you want to cancel by clicking "OK", or cancel cancelling by clicking "Cancel". It never occurred to anyone designing this that clicking "Cancel" to not cancel was a little confusing? This isn't new, by the way. They've had more than enough time to redesign it. But either they don't care, they're wildly incompetent, or they made it bad on purpose. Or, likely, a combination of all three.