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"Finding tax forms online"
04/15/2003 Entry
As a tribute to the big day - today is the deadline to file taxes in the US - I thought I'd post a pointer to a related research paper I wrote: Serving Citizens' Needs: Minimizing Hurdles to Accessing Government Information Online in which I look at how people look for tax forms online and how site design often impedes the process.
In my study on people's Web use skills, I asked people to perform various tasks online. (For more information about the methodology, see the first parts of the paper or for more details see "Beyond Logs and Surveys: In-Depth Measures of People's Web Use Skills" which I have not put online but am happy to share if you send me an email.) One of the tasks was to locate tax forms, in particular, the federal 1040. This was one of those tasks that would have been fairly straight forward if the IRS's Web site was user-friendly. It's gotten much better since the study, but some of the major limitations remain. Just to cite two:
1. If you type in irs.gov it goes to an error page. How much would it take to redirect those inquiries to www.irs.gov?
2. Once you get on the actual Forms and Instructions page, there is a lengthy description of how one retrieves pdf documents before providing the list of forms. Moreover, the lengthy description is precisely the length of how much fits on a 17" screen ("above the fold" as I like to call it) so people get confused and don't even realize that they are on the right page. And no, I'm not just guessing that people get confused, the beauty of sitting with so many respondents (100) and recording what they do is that I have data to back up this claim.
For more details, see the paper.
Replies: 3 Comments have been posted, click here to see them and add your own
The "irs.gov not found" error is an Internet Explorer thing.
In Mozilla/Netscape, when you type in
"irs.gov", it will try
1) http://irs.gov
2) http://www.irs.gov
If you type in "foo" (without a TLD), it will try
1) http://foo.com
2) http://www.foo.com
I never realized IE did something different.
Posted by Jacques Distler @ 04/16/2003 10:47 AM CST
Jacques, thanks for sharing. If IE doesn't offer the option of forwarding to www-dot I think site administrators need to be conscious of this. IE is the most widely used browser in the general user population so Web masters need to cater to making the experience user friendly for those who use it. Or are you saying that the host can't do anything about it? (That is, the IRS's site can't redirect from irs.gov to www.irs.gov?)
Posted by eszter @ 04/16/2003 05:26 PM CST
Big companies do this all the time.
bigbiz.com might have separate machines:
www.bigbiz.com
mail.bigbiz.com
ftp.bigbiz.com
etc., each with its own DNS entry.
They then create a fake entry for a machine "bigbiz.com" and, at their corporate routers, redirect SMTP traffic (port 25) destined for "bigbiz.com" to "mail.bigbiz.com", HTTP traffic (port 80) to "www.bigbiz.com", etc.
This is, as I said, standard practice at many big domains. It is also (as Ed Felten will tell you, or as I discussed here) probably illegal under the Super-DMCA statutes passed or pending in several states.
Posted by Jacques Distler @ 04/17/2003 11:08 AM CST
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