Illustration by Cynthia Marinakos.

I got an email recently telling me to confirm subsidy details for vacation care. Here’s how it went:

“To receive your Child Care Subsidy you must confirm these details by logging into myGov.

This is to ensure your entitlements are paid correctly. If this step is not confirmed via your myGov account, you will not have your Child Care Subsidy applied.

To confirm this, please follow the below steps:

• Log into your myGov account
• Click on Centrelink
• Select Menu, then My Family
• Select Child Care
• Select Enrolments

From here there will be a list of your children and the childcare services they attend.

You need to look for the ‘Pending Confirmation’ items under the Enrolments Status. Click Review to undertake the step.”

Line breaks after each sentence. A list of steps as dot points. Short sentences. Incredibly, all the steps worked too.

What a dream email!

Wouldn’t it be awesome if all communications were this well formatted?!

It made it easy for me to do what I needed to do. Quickly and easily. That was important to me because this task wasn’t the main thing I wanted to do when I got online.

I actually wanted to book my daughter into care before getting into my to do list for the day.

I found out I her registration to get care rebates was about to expire. These steps helped me make sure I could book and still get rebates.

I felt thankful and relieved. Confirming the details was a secondary task. It took extra time I wasn’t expecting so I appreciated the smooth process.

So many processes are clunky, unintuitive, and unfriendly. Yet it was obvious this business had tested the process. And understood how to format content so it was quick and easy to read and understand.