How Kansas lost the ‘weird shortcodes’ and modernized its UI system

Star Wars and disco were hip when Kansas built its previous unemployment insurance system and it was “sufficient,” Kansas Labor Secretary Amber Shultz says. But on the latest episode of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast, Shultz describes how, over the course of two years, the state transformed that system into a modern one, with a modern user interface. A system that had to be taken offline constantly — “a house of cards” — has been replaced by one that has nearly perfect uptime, she says. “Our contact center representatives, they couldn’t use a mouse, and they had to memorize all these hundreds of weird shortcodes for abbreviation back in those days, and then the code was not documented,” she says. Today, the state heralds a different story, one in which call centers see 60% fewer calls and processing time has been reduced by 80%.

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New episodes of StateScoop’s Priorities Podcast are posted each Wednesday. For more of the latest news and trends across the state and local government technology community, subscribe to the Priorities Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,Soundcloud or Spotify.