The Invisible Barrier in Digitalisation: The Lack of Filtering

One of the most frustrating things you run into when looking for a personal development course on a municipality-run training platform is that the system shows you “what it offers” rather than “what you’re looking for”. When you go into the Personal Development section on Enstitü İstanbul İSMEK, more than eighty programmes appear in a single list, but one basic piece of information that would make that list meaningful is missing: which courses still have places, and which are full. The only filter on offer is a split by sub-category; yet what a citizen really needs is to find a course they can enrol on without wasting time.

This gap may look like a small detail, but from a user experience point of view it creates a chain of problems. First you find the course, then you open the course details, from there you look at the list of centres, and sometimes, after choosing a centre, you’re met with the warning “applications for this programme are not currently being accepted”. In other words, the information that a course is full or closed exists in the system, but it has never been carried through to the search and filtering stage; the user has to click far more than necessary just to find it out. What you expect from a digital platform is that it protects the user’s time; here the exact opposite happens, and the discovery process drags on needlessly.

The cause of such shortcomings is usually not bad intent but a prioritisation error. Digital systems belonging to public institutions are often built around “publishing content”; the real challenge, the need for “the user to reach the right content in as few steps as possible”, gets pushed into the background. Another possible reason is that the system doesn’t hold real-time capacity data behind the scenes, or, even if it does, no development work has been done to bring that data to the front end. In institutional settings, improvements like this are usually prioritised as user feedback builds up, but if the feedback channel isn’t visible enough either, that build-up never happens.

Indeed, there’s an irony here: a way to get in touch does in fact exist; there’s even a call centre number (Alo 153) and physical addresses listed, but this channel sits well outside the main user flow, that is, the course search screen. And there isn’t even a digital form or an email address. At the very moment a user runs into a problem, no “report this” or “get in touch” option appears in front of them; they have to go to a separate page in the menu. In digital product design this is a classic mistake that could be described as “loss of context”: the feedback mechanism isn’t where the need arises, but tucked away in a separate, isolated corner.

In conclusion, although this example may seem small in scale, it reveals a general weakness of digital services: there’s an interface, there’s content, there’s even a communication channel, but connecting them to one another according to the user’s needs falls short. A good digital experience is measured not just by presenting information, but by getting that information to users at the moment they make a decision. Elements such as filtering, search and feedback should be designed not as independent features, but as parts of a single user journey; otherwise digitalisation amounts to nothing more than a pile of forms moved from paper to screen.

I’m reaching out to you through my own platform. If you’d like us to review and assess your website or app and help it deliver a better experience, you can reach us here: bilgin.kilic@swordbros.com