UK Landlord Forum / Life

Even though they appear to have been through a massive re-design... the webpages for your self assessment are still so crappy in my opinion. It feels, to me, like the questions they ask through the process are often deliberately opaque, even misleading and the way they present stuff to you is just made difficult for no reason.

I'm gonna cite two examples that annoyed me yesterday... as I was doing this last minute... and one is new, one has been around a while...

The question where it asks you what accounting basis you've used... the answer is a "yes" or "no" type answer... but what they really want to know is whether you used "cash" or "traditional"... we all know that a radio-button selection UI component need not be just "yes" or "no"... so instead of the question being phrased as it is - why don't they just have:

"What accounting basis was used?" with options of "Cash" or "Traditional"? Wouldn't that be simpler, clearer?

Then the mortgage interest... we know how this has changed over recent years... and they now seem to have settled on an approach where you have to manually divide your real number by 4 for them! And they give you a long red message about it too. Why on Earth would they choose that? Why don't they just let you enter the amount of interest you've been charged over the year - and the amount you went and asked your Lender for specifically on the Interest Certificate they'll have provided you - and their systems can do the division by 4? Why pass that small task across to the end user?

I shake my head in disbelief every time I use this system.

And don't talk to me about their weird ways of providing you the option to see your return... view, save, print... colour or black and white... PDF or HTML... it's so unnecessarily convoluted. Surprised they don't offer me the option of downloading as a ginormous inverted colour scheme JPG.

Quote from: Hippogriff on February 01, 2021, 09:40:25 AM
And don't talk to me about their weird ways of providing you the option to see your return... view, save, print... colour or black and white... PDF or HTML... it's so unnecessarily convoluted. Surprised they don't offer me the option of downloading as a ginormous inverted colour scheme JPG.

At least they've finally stopped telling you how long it will take to download at various dial-up modem speeds.

A lot of the time they've got as far as redesigning the first landing page as all modern and colourful and user-cuddly, but as soon as you click through from there, you're back in the old stuff - which I don't actually mind, as long as it works properly, is consistent, and hasn't just been clumsily mangled to shoehorn in some change in legislation.

As I help a couple of older friends with their tax returns, my pet peeve is that the state pension doesn't get filled in automatically. Private pensions, employment, all gets filled in automatically these days. The state pension, which you'd have thought would be the easiest of all? Not so much. I know it's not that hard to work out but it just feels like they're being deliberately crap.