Precarious Experiences: Citizens' Frustrations, Anxieties and Burdens of an Online Welfare Benefit System

TL;DR

This study explores how digital welfare systems like the UK's Universal Credit impact claimants' experiences, highlighting issues of digital exclusion, power imbalance, and suggesting design improvements to mitigate harm.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into claimants' lived experiences with digital welfare systems and offers eight recommendations for improving system design to reduce digital barriers.

Findings

Digital channels can create power imbalances for claimants.

Claimants face reduced agency and resources interacting with online systems.

Design choices can negatively affect claimants' ability to access help.

Abstract

There is a significant overlap between people who are supported by income-related social welfare benefits, often in precarious situations, and those who experience greater digital exclusion. We report on a study of claimants using the UK's Universal Credit online welfare benefit system designed as, and still, "digital by default". Through data collection involving remote interviews (n=11) and online surveys (n=66), we expose claimants' own lived experiences interacting with this system. The claimants explain how digital channels can contribute to an imbalance of power and agency, at a time when their own circumstances mean they have reduced abilities, resources and capacities, and where design choices can adversely affect people's utility to leverage help from their own wider socio-technical ecosystems. We contribute eight recommendations from these accounts to inform the future design and development of digital welfare benefit systems for this population, to reduce digital barriers and harms.