Usability Hall of Shame
Category: Design... Usability Hall of Shame...
Posted Tuesday, June 28, 2005 at 04:27 PM [GMT-6]

One of the effects of my foray into website design is that I've gained a heightened sensitivity to design elements in all areas, from the perspectives of both aesthetics and usability. And what I've realized is that we encounter a lot of bad designs in our daily lives. These designs are often perceived only peripherally, impinging on our senses like a dull headache that's been around for so long that we no longer notice it directly.

Well, I'm tired of suffering silently as a result of dumb decisions on the part of people who should know better. Henceforth, I plan to document the offending products, processes or even people (in a generic way, of course) which add to the collective angst and stress of living in a modern world. Do I expect anything will change as a result of these mini-rants? No...but I'll feel better, in some small but important way. So, I present to you the Gazette's Usability Hall of Shame.

The initial inductees both come to us from the wacky world of telecommunications, from SBC and CellularOne, to be exact.

CellularOne is a multi-billion dollar corporation, and yet it has managed to create and maintain an online account management system that would be cutting edge if we were still living in, say, 1998. The website won't let you save your login information and you can pay bills online only via credit or debit card (as long as you have a Mastercard, Visa or Amex; no Discover, please. When it comes time to enter your payment information, the input field for the credit/debit card number has been designated as a password field, meaning that instead of being able to see the 16 numbers you're typing, you see a string of black dots. If you make a typo, you won't know it until the transaction is rejected. Note to CellularOne web designers: password fields are for passwords.

Let's move on to SBC, another multi-billion dollar corporation who cares about protecting customer privacy so much that they just sent out a letter letting us know that they really, really care. However, they're still going to share our "customer proprietary network information" with related companies unless we call a certain phone number by a certain date and follow the instructions given to us by the computerized voice on the other end of the line.

I decided to opt out of SBC's "policy of caring" and so I called the number, where I was instructed to enter my phone number, area code first, followed by the seven digit number...followed by the three numbers that follow my phone number as it appears on my bill. What?! Why did they think it was unimportant to mention that in the letter? Of course, I had to hang up and go find a bill, and start the process over (which, by the way, involved redialing six times because the tollfree number was now busy). Note to SBC letter writers: When sending instructions to customers, why not consider the revolutionary idea of sending complete instructions? Unless, of course, you really don't want people to use that nasty opt-out option.

Here's another note to all companies who deal with private citizens as customers: we don't like having to opt-out of something in order to protect our personal and private data. So don't do anything extra with that data unless we explicitly agree to opt in to whatever you have in mind.

OK...I feel better. Any other nominations for the Usability Hall of Shame? It's a pretty big edifice, although I suspect we could still fill it in a hurry if we concentrate.