“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.

I’ve read maybe one or two articles over the lifetime of this relationship, and now that I want to STOP receiving emails about real estate I will never buy, the American-Statesman is making it as difficult as possible for me to tell them so.

I’ve started using password-management software in the last year or so, but before I never bothered: I can always get the site to remind me, right? Well…

Plus point of this form: your login is your email address, and they tell you so right there on the form.

However, since I’ve forgotten the password and cannot sign in, there is no apparent reason for me to fill in that box. What I want is the “Forgot your password?” link, and I go straight for that.

When I click it, however, I get an error message as shown below:

Hmm. You don’t see many sites where you must fill in a field in order to click a link. That’s confusing.

As instructed, I fill in the email address, THEN click “Forgot your password?”

Result: I find myself at a page which is blank except for the American-Statesman’s top navigation. It does not tell me whether anything happened as a result of my filling in the email address and clicking the link. Did it work? Was there a silent error?

I go back and do it again. Same result. At this point I assume that maybe it worked but no one’s bothering to tell me.

Later on, in my mailbox, I find that it has worked – in fact the login info has been sent to me twice.

Solutions:

If a field must be filled in to permit a click, use a Submit button rather than a link.

And give your user some !@#$@ feedback on whether the operation was a success!

Here we have an example from fotolog. Can you spot the problem?

I’ve not only forgotten my password, I’ve forgotten my username. How should I remember, when I have usernames on dozens (if not hundreds) of other sites, they all differ in their norms and requirements, and the page offers me no clue as to the format of the username. Is it my email address? I tried that – the text box won’t allow me to enter that many characters; at least that gives me a clue. Is it “deirdre”? I entered that, and the “authentication test”, and fotolog told me that a password reset had been sent to my email address.

Fortunately, I actually remembered which of my many email addresses this should come to. But nothing came. After a while it occurred to me that I probably wasn’t the first deirdre to sign up on fotolog. I tried “deirdres”. At least here it gave me some feedback: no such user exists. I finally remembered that my fotolog username is deirdrestraughan, and was able to recover the password.

originally published on Countries Beginning with I, May 30, 2007 (with new addendum here)

I hope Ryanair’s web designers get big bonuses this year: they are helping the company rake in money it doesn’t deserve. And there’s nothing for a frustrated passenger to do but bend over and take it.

I just booked a flight for my daughter and myself to fly from Italy (where we live) to visit my father in the UK (where he lives) before he has major surgery in June. Upon arriving at the payment screen (for two passengers) I get the following options:

If I wish to travel without checking in baggage, I must choose Online Checkin/Priority Boarding, which has a cost of 6 euros. I can’t leave the selector on “How many bags to Check in?” – that results in an error.

I can’t actually use the online check-in service because (a) two of us are travelling together, one of whom needs to check a bag and (b):

At this point in the purchase process, the application KNOWS that I am travellng from Italy to the UK, so why is it offering – forcing! – a service which it knows I cannot use?

Notice the NB at the bottom of the screenshot above. Yeah, like hell. I have rarely seen Ryanair staff in Bergamo offer priority boarding even to people who need it (“passengers needing assistance or travelling with small children”). The fact that priority boarding is specifically excluded for Italy acknowledges this. So I have in effect paid a six-euro tax for Ryanair’s poor web design.

Furthermore, there is no way to speak with anyone at Ryanair except via a reservations center which costs €1.50 a minute to speak to (or, more likely, hold for).

If Ryanair needs that badly to make more money, they should just charge me more for the flight. This kind of crap makes them look incompetent in web design, which in turn leads the customer to wonder how much they can be trusted with the bigger stuff, such as security of credit card data – not good for a company that lives through online bookings. And/or it leads me to suspect that they have found a dishonest new way to make their fares look lower when in fact they cannot afford to fly me without that extra 6 euros. Which is another form of false advertising.

Addendum, June 26 – When we checked in for the return flight from Luton last night, the lady told us we had one priority check-in paid for and could purchase another at the desk “over there.” This reminded me of the above website irritation so I said: “As a matter of fact, I didn’t want that priority check-in and couldn’t use it from Italy, but your website is messed up and forced me to buy it.”

“Some other people have said that,” she replied. So… Ryanair desk staff are well aware of this problem. But either none of them have tried to communicate it to corporate HQ, or HQ doesn’t care (or likes things the way they are – they make more money). This was a red flag to a bull (me). The lady’s apparent indifference to the matter didn’t help.

“Maybe someone should be told to fix it,” I said. “There’s no webmaster address anywhere on the site, so I couldn’t reach anyone to complain about it.”

Then she got defensive and snotty: “Well, obviously a lot of people manage to figure it out.”

Ross was, as usual, squirming with embarrassment at her mother’s obsession with making things better (and pissing people off), so I left the counter, grumbling, rather than get into a fight with the lady (had one with Ross instead).

But, really… I don’t pay to be smart-mouthed by someone who’s supposed to serve me, and, while my friend Sara told me that she did manage to book on Ryanair without paying for luggage or priority boarding, if the feat is so difficult that I, with 25 years’ experience online couldn’t figure it out in a good 15 minutes of trying, well, we have a usability problem, don’t we?

Solution: Anyone know how to reach someone who has influence on web design at Ryanair.com?