A UX review of the PACER website

Medium.com has an interesting post reviewing the usability of the Federal Court system's PACER website. The review tries to be fair and not overly critical of the site, but they also give constructive ideas on how the site could be more user-friendly. They focus on the main sections of the site:

• The public landing page, originally designed in the early 2000's. The review says that there is too much clutter on the landing page, with key space taken up by secondary information - this could be cleaned up. Also, the page doesn't comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in that the text does not have enough contrast and could easily be adjusted. 
• The User Login and Dashboard is just a headache, with a lengthy registration process and unclear explanations for what is required. Once a user manages to get a login un and pw there are three different options for logging in and after logging in there are too many clicks to get to the case search screen.

The article goes on to critique the Search Results and the Case Record Detail. There is even a video of a particularly confusing web interface. The best part is that the article offers easy fixes for all of PACER's problems with graphic representation of what it could look like.