“Did it come on fast with you?”

“Yeah, it just seemed to happen overnight. All of a sudden, I can’t see!”

I’ve been extremely nearsighted most of my life. Now, to my intense irritation, I am also farsighted: I can’t read small text.

I refuse – so far – to get reading glasses. I already have one pair of glasses on my face all day, having to hassle with two different ones… well, let’s put that off as long as we can. (No, I don’t want bifocals – that would force me back to the great big lenses that were so popular in the 1970s and look so incredibly stupid now – I like my sleek little designer frames, thank you).

This new handicap has made me acutely aware of a fundamental problem in web design: it’s all apparently done by 25-year-olds who have no notion that everyone in the world isn’t exactly like them. Many sites, blog templates, etc. use small type, because the designer thinks it looks cool. Well, it does, except that I can’t READ it. If you have a message to convey via text, it’s passing me right by.

Where there’s text that I definitely want to read, my salvation is Ctrl + – the standard browser shortcut to increase text size.

However…

Some sites disable text size changes, apparently because the designer insists that I should read at whatever type size he finds comfortable.

On some sites text doesn’t exist as text – it’s a graphic embedded in a super-cool Flash image that cannot be resized (this is a particularly Italian sin – Italian designers love Flash way too much).

On some sites you can use Ctrl +, but parts of the page become unusable – lines of text run underneath other page elements and can’t be read, text in menus spills off the edge.

When a site uses fixed-size popup windows, text becomes impossible to read, and form lose their buttons – the window can’t be resized, and you can’t reach the button to Submit or Send unless you remember to Ctrl – (minus) to get the page size back down to what the designer planned for. This unnecessary extra step is off-putting enough that I’m not going to bother completing your damned form.

So, my advice to all you young web designers: someday you, too will be middle-aged and that 8-point type will become a blur to you. Start designing for that now, and you will find a grateful audience among those of us who are already there.

Dan bought a phone for me and future visitors to use when here, but before I arrived this time he had realized that it was absurd to pay Cingular a dollar a day to keep the service active when no one was using it. So I had to figure out the most cost-effective solution for myself this time around.

I picked up phone plan brochures from a store and just as the young man at Circuit City had told me, my best bet was VirginMobile: they offer monthly or by-the-minute plans with no contract. I bought the cheapest phone they offer ($20), though I wouldn’t recommend this model (a Kyocera) – it’s the slowest phone I’ve ever encountered, taking a second to respond to a button press to invoke a menu. And the battery life is crap. But it took me a few days to perceive these shortcomings. Next time I won’t buy the cheapest.

When I got it home, I had to deal with signing up with VirginMobile. First I tried their activation website. I followed the clear and easy multi-step process to select the plan I wanted ($100 for a month, with 1000 anytime minutes and free nights and weekends).

After 5 or 6 steps answering questions and making selections, I was supposed to enter the phone’s serial number. Following the instructions on the site, I located it on a sticker inside the phone’s battery bay. It is printed in very small type, and there was one digit which could have been a 5 or a 6. I took a guess, entered a serial number in the text box on the site, and clicked the Submit button.

I suddenly found myself back at the beginning of the activation process, with no explanation as to why I was there. I knew the activation hadn’t been completed, because I had not yet been asked for any personal information, credit card, etc. But I had no clue what had gone wrong. Was the site simply broken? I tried twice more, with the same result.

There was nothing for it but to call the toll-free number to activate by phone. I had to do this from my friend’s cellphone, which cost her minutes. (I know most people don’t care about this, having far more minutes than they actually use every month – and Tin Tin certainly didn’t – but I’m always acutely aware of it.)

The automated phone system is done with a “hip” young voice, obviously designed to appeal to the majority of Virgin’s customers, which instantly grated on my bitchy-middle-aged-lady nerves. Having to g through a phone tree to make the same choices I had already made three times on the website was also irritating, though understandable. But I was not pleased when the cheerful recorded voice advised me, during a wait period, that I could do all this myself on the website! Believe me, honey, if I coulda, I woulda.

I finally got a live operator (who had a distractingly bad head cold but was nice and competent) and went through a bunch more choices. When we got to the serial number, she told me that number was already in use. This explained the problem I had on the website – it choked when I entered the wrong number. But instead of telling me that was the problem, it bounced me out of the process without any explanation. Not helpful.
Then it came time to pay. Uh oh. Here we go again. My credit card, though issued in the US, has a foreign billing address. Many or most American companies can’t deal with that. The operator I was speaking to spoke to a supervisor, but there was nothing to be done. I had to borrow Tin Tin’s credit card to pay for the phone. Which is ridiculous and humiliating for a grown woman who is otherwise completely capable of managing her own financial life!

I’m still wondering.

I’m Deirdré Straughan, and if you’re in at the beginning of this blog, it’s probably because you know me already. If not, you can learn far more than anyone needs to know about me and my life at my site Countries Beginning With I.

Over years of working with software development teams, and with the customers who had to use the resulting software, I have come to care deeply about usability. And not just in software.

Usability is a useful concept in many areas of life. The importance of making things usable seems so obvious to me, but I guess it isn’t to everybody. I spend a lot of my life bitching about how things could be better: software could be less frustrating, devices and appliances could be more obvious in their use, processes could be more streamlined and sensible, telephone trees could actually get you somewhere, companies could be nicer to the customers they are supposed to serve.

It seems as if every day is a potential minefield of things that irritate me, and probably everyone else who has to deal with them. Maybe I’m just a nasty pre-menopausal kvetch permanently ready for a fight. Or maybe the world, while becoming ever more marvellously complex, is also becoming ever less usable. (Or both.)

There are many causes for the increasing difficulty of navigating everyday life. Because of this variety of causes, some usability problems could be solved easily, others… not so easily, if at all. Still, I’m a solutions-oriented person, so for every problem that I point out, I will try to suggest a solution. Will this be any use at all? Will anybody who actually has the power to make the needed changes listen? Maybe not. But at least I will have tried.

And you still can hear me singin’ to the people who don’t listen
To the things that I am sayin’, prayin’ someone’s gonna hear
And I guess I’ll die explaining how the things that they complain about
Are things they could be changing, hoping someone’s gonna care.

To Beat the Devil – Kris Kristofferson