Rollout of new Massachusetts unemployment site handled poorly for people with multiple email addresses

The Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA) recently rolled out a new website for workers to request and manage their unemployment benefits. I can’t say which of the old site’s many problems have been fixed, since I am not currently unemployed and therefore I literally can’t access much of the site’s functionality. However, I am able to comment on one particular aspect of the rollout which was handled poorly for people who have multiple email addresses.

Here’s the email I received today announcing the new site and the new requirement for people to use MyMassGov, the Massachusetts equivalent of the federal login.gov, to log into the new website.

The Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA) has made its online services better. We have a new website called Unemployment Services for Workers.

The new website is where you will be able to manage your unemployment account, including:

• Seeing your unemployment information.
• Asking for your weekly benefits.
• Reading letters from us.

It takes the place of the UI Online website.

Say hello to MyMassGov: A new way to log in!

Now, you will use your MyMassGov login to get into your unemployment account.

What you should know:

• One Login: No need to remember multiple passwords and usernames to access state services.
• Extra Security: For your protection, you will need to set up Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). This means you’ll get a verification code by text, a phone call, or an authenticator app, and follow instructions to enter it to make sure it’s your account.

Do you already have a MyMassGov account?

Great! You don’t need to make a new one. You can use that login information to access your claim account starting today. Make sure the email for your MyMassGov account is the same email this message was sent to.

Do you see the problem?

🚨 What if the email address for my existing MyMassGov account isn’t the same as the email address I previously provided to the old unemployment website? 🚨

Many people use multiple email addresses sequentially throughout their lives. Since the unemployment website is one you tend to use for intermittent periods separated by years of not using it at all, lots of people are going to have email addresses associated with the site that are not the same as their current address.

Furthermore, some people use different email addresses at every website to protect their privacy. When I received the above email this morning, it was sent to an address that I had only given to the DUA website, different from the address I had separately given to MyMassGov when I created my account there.

There are any number of ways the developers at MyMassGov and DUA could have solved for this use case. For example:

• MyMassGov could support the ability to associate multiple email addresses with a single account, as both login.gov and id.me do.
• The DUA website could use something other than your email address, e.g., your name and social security number, to link your MyMassGov account to your DUA account.
• The DUA website could allow you to first log in with your old username and password, then log into your MyMassGov account to link the two together.¹
• The email could have provided a link to instructions for how to temporarily change the email address on your MyMassGov account to match the address on your DUA account.²

Here is how I ended up solving this problem:

1. Log into MyMassGov and change my email address there to match the email address previously given to the DUA website.
2. Log into the new DUA website using my MyMassGov account and finish linking the two accounts together.
3. Log out of the DUA website.
4. Log into MyMassGov again and change my email address back to the one that I had previously been using for it.
5. Log into the DUA website again, using my original MyMassGov username and password, and confirm that the linkage between the two sites is preserved (as it should be) despite changing my MyMassGov email address.

Now let me ask you this: which of the two email addresses is DUA going to use to email me in the future, and how do I change it? There’s no way on the DUA website I could find to view or change the email address the DUA has on file for me. Is this just functionality they haven’t built yet that is planned for later? Or does the email address they use automatically get set from my MyMassGov email address? If so, then if I edit my MyMassGov email address will DUA see the change immediately, or will it not see the change until the next time I log into the DUA website?

[UPDATE ON THE ABOVE QUESTIONS: Nearly six hours after I logged into the unemployment web site this morning, I received four emails from the DUA site notifying me that someone had logged into my account and that the email address associated with my profile had been updated. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that these emails which were supposed to arrive contemporaneously with my actions were delayed by nearly six hours, it appears that when you change your MyMassGov email address and log into the DUA site, this causes your email address on the DUA site to be updated in the background to match the MyMassGov email. This is not ideal—I should be able to edit the email address to which DUA correspondence is sent and I should be able to use a different address from my MyMassGov one—but it’s better than the email address being both invisible in the app and impossible to update in any way.]

All of these are user stories the designers of the new DUA website could and should have anticipated and planned for. After so many years waiting for the DUA website to finally be updated, it’s disappointing to see balls being dropped like this right from the start.

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¹In fact, this may already be possible, but they didn’t say anything about this in the email!

²Though that only works if you still have access to the email address associated with your DUA account; you can’t change your MyMassGov email address to one you can’t receive email at.