Ordinary Gweilo

My wife is a techno-phobe.  She doesn’t like computers, and only uses them because she has no choice.  If something doesn’t work, she gives up – and, of course, this provides makes her even more convinced that computers are best avoided.

Me, I will try to find out what is wrong and how to solve the problem.  Then I wonder how it can be that large companies can build websites that don’t work unless you have a very specific configuration and/or use a specific browser.

I know not everyone will agree, but I expect all websites to work in the current version of Internet Explorer without any significant problems – and I think they should also work in Firefox and Safari (subject to the limitations of those browsers).  I say this as a user, so please don’t tell me that IE is the one with the problem – like it not, IE is the browser that most people use, and it should be possible to test your website in IE.  If a feature doesn’t work well in IE then you are welcome to moan about it, but I don’t care – if it doesn’t work, don’t use it.

IE 7 was available as a public beta for months, and anyone with an important website who didn’t start testing it with IE 7 at that time is just stupid.  It’s not good enough to warn people against installing IE 7 when Microsoft were including it in automatic updates that many users will not have known how to stop.

If you have a security certificate on your site, ensure that it is valid and correct.  Ordinary users don’t understand warning messages about certificates, and may well assume your site is broken if they get a message like that.  It is.  Fix it.

I don’t understand why I get warnings about secure sites.  I don’t like them, and I am sure they confuse ‘ordinary users’.   

Pop-up windows are often blocked (even IE does this now), so don’t design your website so that essential information appears in a pop-up window.  The government’s Smart ID website seemed to suffer from this particular piece of stupidity.

A screen that asks you to enter your user id and password should be extremely simple.  It certainly should not have any things that flash in an annoying way.  Yes, this means you, HSBC.  In fact, HSBC Internet Banking is a nightmare from beginning to end, so I am not at all surprised to see people still using ATMs for things they could do on their home computer.      

I could go on and on.