Bad UX Encounter - Tokyo Local Government's Waterwork Department
Share my experience when I tried to change the payment method of my water bill.
The national government's websites always have bad UI. But do you know what's worse? It's websites of local government. Here I share my experience with the Tokyo waterwork department when I tried to change my payment methods from manual transfer to automated.
The Problem
I had been paying my water bill manually through convenience stores. But it's tiring to go to the store every month. And even worse, sometimes I forget to pay and they eventually stopped my water supply. I'm a lazy person, but I finally dealt with my procrastination and decided to set up an automatic water bill payment.
The local waterwork department provides two methods, through mails and through online. To avoid unnecessary mail exchanges, I chose the online process. It should not be hard, should it?
The Website
I googled and found the official description on how to change the payment method. To change the payment method, I need to create an account for the waterwork department website first. OK, fine. So I visited the website and filled required information. It turned out that I can only create a temporary account here, and then they'll send a password for the account by mail after a week. Then I can log in to the site with the password. So my first purpose of avoiding exchanging mail is already failed.
I received the password after ten days, so I revisited the website. The login form prevents copy-paste. OK, still fine. I logged in to the site, went to my portal, and found the "change personal info" menu. There were two links related to payment related.
- Change payment method to credit card
- Change debit transfer date
My initial thought was to use my credit card, so I chose "Change payment method to credit card." I entered all information and proceeded to the confirm page. Then I realized that if I use my credit card, a 50 yen (almost 40 cents) discount for debit is not applied. Obviously, it's not much, but I was annoyed and decided to use a debit account instead.
So I selected the "Change debit transfer date" menu. I felt a little strange because it's not like "Set up debit account" but just "Change debit transfer date." But it's the only menu related to debit, so I chose that anyway. Then it showed the "select debit date" form, so I chose 24 (to set the transfer date at the 24th of each month). It said, "Debit date is changed. You'll pay your water bill by automatic debit transfer on 24th every month."
But wait, I have never set up my debit account. How can they set up the debit process without knowing my account? When I carefully checked the result page, I found a small warning among other dozens of notifications and warnings at the bottom of the page. It said, "This applied only if you set up the debit account."
Yeah, I know! But where can I set it up? And why don't you show any clear warnings or errors though I haven't set up the account?
Anyway, I looked for their portal site and couldn't find any debit account related settings. So I googled and finally found the related information. They said I needed to create another account on another service to set up my debit account. What the hell! But OK, I understand. The waterwork department provides a portal for the users, which took more than one week just to create an account. And on the site, I can change my payment method to the credit card or the debit transfer date. But if I want to set up the actual debit account, I need another account for another website.
So again, I clicked another account creation page. I entered all of my information again, including the customer number printed on the water bill, name, address, email, and phone number. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait for one week this time. They immediately sent the email including my new account's username and initial password. So I logged in to the website.
However, unfortunately, their website was in maintenance mode until 9 AM. OK, fine. Fortunately, it was almost 9 AM, so I just waited for a few minutes. And again, I entered the username and initial password. Finally, I got:
This password is expired. What!? I checked the email incliding the initial password, and found a small warning; "This password is effective only once". So I used my only chance just to see "It's in maintenance mode now." And I needed to do the account creation again.
At that time, I was done. I could do this process again, but I was exhausted to deal with all of their BSs. I'll continue to pay the water bills manually every month. It's much, much better for my mental health than using any of their services.