California’s Employment Development Department (EDD) is rolling out updates to its online unemployment certification system as part of an ongoing effort to make benefits more accessible and easier to understand for users across the state.
The changes are part of EDDNext, the department’s broader modernization initiative aimed at improving customer experience and reducing delays in unemployment insurance payments.
According to EDD, the department reviewed more than 45 screens and over 1,700 lines of content within the online certification process to simplify the language, improve the layout, and reduce confusion for applicants.
“We made a full assessment of the whole unemployment certification experience from beginning to end,” said Alberto Larios, Public Information Officer for the EDD. “The goal was making it more user-friendly and for people to understand what is being said to them.”
The certification process is the step that unemployment claimants must complete regularly to continue receiving benefits. EDD officials said unclear wording in the previous system sometimes caused applicants to answer questions incorrectly, leading to delays and follow-up inquiries from the department.
“One of the goals is to eliminate all that back and forth,” Larios said. “If somebody sends the wrong answer to a question, that can involve follow-up questions on our end, which delays the process for their payment.”
EDD officials said the updated system uses plainer language and more direct questions. For example, a previous question that asked users whether there was “any reason other than sickness or injury” they could not accept full-time work has been replaced with a simpler version asking whether they were unavailable to work for another reason.
The department said customer feedback played a significant role in shaping the changes, although Larios noted he was not directly involved with the user experience teams that gathered and analyzed responses from claimants.
“Customers were involved, and their feedback was key,” he said. “The update included their suggestions just to make it easier to understand the entire process.”
Before the system launched publicly, EDD employees and select users tested the revised certification process to ensure the updated wording was easier to follow, according to Larios.
The updated online system is now available in the eight most commonly spoken languages in California, including Spanish, an expansion officials say is especially important for counties with large multilingual populations such as Kern County.
“This whole update of the certification process is available in the top eight spoken languages in California,” Larios said. “It increases the number of people that we serve.”
EDD officials say the modernization effort reflects changes the department has been implementing over the past several years to improve services statewide.
“The bottom line is to serve customers better,” Larios said.
People with questions about the new certification process can visit EDD’s official website, where they can access unemployment insurance information, multilingual resources, and online assistance tools, including a chatbot.
