The UI Lexicon Project
To better understand the problem and find potential solutions, the U.S. Department of Labor conducted an exploratory UI Lexicon research project.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 100 million initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) have been filed in the U.S. At the height of the pandemic in April 2020, more than 6 million applications poured in during just a week. More than 46 million individuals — roughly one in four American workers — have received at least one week of UI benefits (source 1, source 2), which the Federal Reserve Bank recently found have a greater impact than other forms of economic stimulus measure (source). This has made UI one of the widest-reaching government programs and put it under enormous pressure for accuracy, efficiency, and fairness.
UI is a complex program and system with a unique set of terms (i.e., lexicon) outlining its rules and functionalities. For individuals attempting to secure benefits, this lexicon forms a barrier to understanding and navigating the system. Claimant-facing communications hosted on publicly accessible websites, application portals, as well as in handbooks and instruction pamphlets, are filled with ill-defined jargon and nuanced usages that create confusion, frustration, and misunderstanding. The confusion diverts resources (e.g., time of the call center representative as the claimants call for clarification of a term), causes delays and mistakes, and breeds friction. The negative customer experience resulting from complicated and poorly defined terminology contributes to decreased user satisfaction, loss of confidence and trust in the UI system, and widening disparities in UI benefit access. Additionally, unclear communication can cause claimants to provide incomplete or inaccurate information with their initial claims, which may result in improper payments.
To better understand the problem and find potential solutions, they conducted an exploratory UI Lexicon research project. They identified the most common terms used across UI programs, analyzed their definitions as appearing in various claimant-facing information platforms, examined the sources of confusion and misunderstanding, and drafted improved definitions for these terms in plain language. This is a summary of what they discovered.Â
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