Monica

another bad user experience

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:53:34 GMT

My employer got bought (again) about a year ago, so we're being moved onto a new benefits setup as of January 1. This means new health insurance (with new prices, sigh...). We were told we'd get our ID cards in December. I have an appointment in early January that would be a pain to reschedule, so I've been watching for these.

Today I received physical mail, but instead of cards, it contained a piece of paper telling me my plan ID # and a URL where I can request cards or print my own.

They sent me paper to tell me how to request paper, instead of just sending the actual paper I needed.

After creating an account (another set of hoops, elided) I saved PDF copies, but I also asked for physical cards because paper probably won't stay in good shape in a wallet for a year. But this was unnecessarily complicated. I also hit a stupid limit: you can make one request per day, but both my medical and dental insurance are now with this carrier, that's two cards, and there was no way to request all cards. I requested the first, which was apparently successful, and when I requested the second I was told I couldn't.

The letter I got suggested I could use "digital cards", meaning download an image on my phone and skip the paper entirely, to "save space in my wallet" (not a concern, since I'm replacing this year's cards!). But my healthcare providers always want to hold the cards, sometimes keeping them for a while so they can do data entry at their convenience during my visit, and I'm not handing over my phone for that. My phone stays with me or, at worst, within my sight and otherwise locked. So paper it is.

I don't know if I'm abnormal or the insurance provider didn't think through their security model (maybe both). They sure didn't think through their model of what's convenient for users or lower-waste for the planet. By the time this is done they will, it appears, have sent me three separate pieces of physical mail.

comments

link roundup (mostly online communities)

Sun, 16 Feb 2020 19:06:10 GMT

I have a lot of links I've been meaning to share accumulating in tabs, tweets, and whatnot. I'd wanted to "curate" this more, but sharing something is better than sharing nothing because I didn't get to that, so...

Stack Exchange (aka Stack Overflow Inc) fired its two longest-serving, most-community-connected community managers. A week before, a third such had given notice, though that was not yet public when the firings happened. Here's a post on Meta.SE. Jon posted about his departure on his blog. He talked more about it in his 2019 in review. Meanwhile, firing Shog9 was egregious enough in the community's eyes that a GoFundMe campaign to help tide him over between jobs has raised $11k so far. Jon and Shog, and also ex-SO moderator George Stocker, have been writing a lot on Twitter about the company's change in direction, often in intertwined threads that are hard to link into.
Jon on Misunderstanding Meta
Effective apologies -- five of these six elements are core to teshuva, the Jewish understanding of repentance. (I forget who shared this where.)
For managers: different ways of showing recognition (I saw this while in the midst of year-end reviews at work)
Designing for people, which is timely as we work to build Codidact
On site design in general, Alphabet of accessibility issues. Yes I experience several of these, and I'm just one person!
Register article on GitLab and diversity
To kill a community
What is community anyway?
Internal monologues or not?
On grieving: how not to say the wrong thing. Synopsis: rings of concern, comfort in, dump out.
siderea on the problem of punching up
Samuel Liew's Stack Exchange timeline

comments

words that exclude

Mon, 27 May 2019 03:08:37 GMT

At work, one of my teams uses a web page, a "dashboard", to coordinate activities for each release. When we start to work on a new release, a (specific) member of the group creates a new dashboard for that release. This dashboard is mostly populated by tables of features, bugs, and other tasks. Each table has several relevant columns, like title, priority, who it's assigned to, and status.

We've been doing this for a while and the dashboards keep growing, so before doing the current one we had a conversation about what we do and don't want. We identified some sections we could get rid of, and I also brought up that the two-column format we were using does not play well with font zoom (which is also obvious in meetings) and could we make it one column? No one objected to that, and the dashboard person published the new one.

A week later he quietly switched it to two columns. Not only that, but the tables were wider and in both columns now so it even more did not fit for me. I said words to the effect of "hey, what happened to the single column we had?", and he said he didn't agree to that and he prefers two columns. When I reminded him that this is an accessibility issue and not a mere preference for me, he said something that's far too common: "oh, you can just..." -- in this case, "oh, you can just make your own copy with one column". He dismissed my need with a "solution" that let him keep his preference without having to make any changes himself.

Yeah. That is not a solution.

I responded that the team resource needs to be accessible to everybody and I was not going to maintain my own copy (and have to track changes to the other one). I also explained to him that as someone with a visual disability I already have to either work around or give up using quite a few resources that are designed for people with perfect vision, that's really tiring, and I should not have to face such stumbling blocks at work from my team. He made a second copy "for people who want this version". A more enlightened approach would have been to fix the "standard" version and then, if he wanted, "just" make his own, but I wasn't going to push that.

That happens a lot, and I don't just mean to me. When someone who isn't part of the default majority finally gets any sort of accommodation, we count is as a victory and don't push for the correct, inclusive change, the one that says "you are equal to me" instead of "I will accommodate you". We know that if we push for what's truly right, we run the risk of being marginalized even more, of being labeled as "whiny" or "needy", of not having the support of our peers and superiors. (And sometimes people do cast preferences as needs and get whiny, muddying those waters for the rest of us.) Thoughtful, informed allies matter, and we don't always have them -- not that people have ill intention but rather that this, too, is a thing that has to be learned.

It's a thing I've had to learn in areas that don't directly affect me. I assume we're all still learning. I cringe some when thinking about an SCA event I ran about 30 years ago and how the site wasn't completely wheelchair-accessible but there were "only" three steps at the front door and we could "just help so-and-so into the hall", right? Yeah, I cluelessly said that, not realizing how many barriers so-and-so faced every day, how this one more thing was one more obstacle. I hope I've gotten a little less clueless around the mobility-impaired, and I'm sure I'm still missing some important clues (there and elsewhere).

I mentioned that I already have to work around or abandon a lot of things because of vision. Let me give you two examples. First, web sites -- there are lots of bad patterns there (I think the UX people call them "dark patterns"). Font zoom is usually the first thing I reach for, but often it's more complicated -- poor contrast (whoever thought light gray text on white backgrounds was a good idea?), layouts that don't work after you zoom a couple notches, that sort of thing. Each time I encounter this I have to ask myself: is this web site really necessary? If it is, I have to invest in writing custom styling and sometimes go begging people to write userscripts to fix these problems, and often those styles and scripts are fragile. ("But can't you just learn web programming/JavaScript/jQuery?" That's not a small thing.)

I've got a ton of these kinds of modifications for Stack Exchange; the site is important enough to me that I don't want to walk away, but good heavens, accessibility is not their strong suit, and they have sometimes been pretty uncaring about that. I had to basically throw a fit to get a fix for something that prevented me from moderating, and then it was a fellow moderator, not an SE employee, who helped me out with a script. (They might be getting better about stuff like this; jury's still out. They did fix another moderation barrier; I had an actual meeting with the product manager about it.)

Here's an example from the physical world. Back before I kept kosher, I went to fast-food places fairly often. These are the kinds of places that post the menu behind the counter. Paper copies of the menu? Why would we need that? Any time I went to such a place, I had to decide whether to ask somebody to read me parts of the menu -- was I willing to both inconvenience someone and embarrass myself? -- or just order blind ("they have cheeseburgers here, right?") and possibly miss out on something I would have liked more but didn't know about. My friends probably thought I ordered the same thing almost every time because I particularly liked it or was in a rut; no, it was because I had learned from past visits something that each restaurant had, so I just went with that most of the time. Nowadays I have fewer choices in restaurants but there are still menu-behind-the-counter places sometimes. Do you know how liberating smartphones are? Now I can take a picture of the menu and use that to order -- not an option that was available in my student days!

People "self-accommodate" by opting out, like I used to with fast food, all the time. The wheelchair user might decide it's too hard to visit that store, city park, or friend's house. The hearing-challenged person learns to fake the less-important conversations to conserve the "could you repeat that?"s for things that matter more. The person who can't afford that restaurant but who doesn't want to be ostracized orders a side salad and a glass of water and tells people "I'm not very hungry". The person whose gender doesn't match outward appearances learns to hold it instead of using restrooms in certain places. The religious-minority student has to decide what to do about the mandatory Christmas pageant. And all the while, people are saying "but can't you just..." -- mouth the words, use the "right" (for the speaker) restroom, commute on a bike to save the cost of the bus pass so you can go to restaurants, learn to read lips, shop online.

I do think it's incumbent on those of us with limitations to do our share of the work. The world doesn't owe me paper menus at the counter if I can take a picture. Web sites don't owe me bigger fonts if I can zoom without breaking the site. But when we've done what we reasonably can do and we still face barriers, we need to be able to get our needs met without a fuss. And those of us in the default majority (as most of us are about something) need that to be second nature, not an "oh sigh, I guess, if you insist, but next time we go with my preference..." sort of thing. I don't know how we learn to do that, but one ingredient in the solution is awareness.

A couple weeks later we used that dashboard in a meeting (distributed team), and the person driving the display pulled up the two-column one. As usual I asked for some zoom, which broke the view, and then I said "let's use the one-column one" (which I had proactively linked to from the agenda page). The same person who had edited the dashboard said "can't you just pull it up on your end?". As a matter of fact, I couldn't. But it shouldn't have even been a question.

comments

poor user experience, hardware edition

Sun, 27 Jan 2019 02:20:45 GMT

I call these "Don Norman doors". It's been 30 years since he wrote The Psychology of Everyday Things (aka POET) and people are still doing stuff like this:

But hey, they recognized the problem -- and "fixed" it with documentation. Yay?

I was recently mystified by the following control in a hotel shower:

One of those controls temperature, but it moves most of the way around so it's not clear whether you need to turn clockwise or counterclockwise. The other one controls which of two different shower heads to dispense water through. Why there are two shower heads is left as an exercise for the user, I guess. (And, of course, when I'm trying to operate a shower, I don't have my glasses on.)

comments

vision problems and computers

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 04:07:50 GMT

A friend is having some vision problems that currently impede her computer use. She knows that I have vision problems and use computers heavily, so she asked me for advice. So I don't lose track of it, and for the possible benefit of others, I'm going to mostly cut and paste the email I sent.

My normal focal distance for reading is about 8-10 inches using bifocals, which makes laptops pretty unworkable and even regular monitors awkward if they're larger (because not everything can be in range at the same time at that distance). I solved this part of the problem by getting a pair of computer glasses, which are focused at a reasonable monitor distance instead of infinity. That is, the part that would normally be distance vision is instead monitor-distance vision, and I also still have the bifocal (my ophthalmologist's suggestion -- "do you ever have to read notes or something too?"). Once you know that your prescription isn't going to be changing a lot, that's something to consider -- but it does mean paying for another pair of glasses. (If you do get computer glasses, get the anti-glare treatment on them even if you're using monitors that are nominally glare-resistant.) Ask your ophthalmologist if this makes sense for you. I did find that I had to bump up font sizes across the board, because monitor-tuned distance vision is different from reading-tuned bifocal. I don't understand all the optics; apparently I can't get a pair of glasses that's just like reading through my bifocal but at twice the distance.

On the software side, here are several things I did. My vision problems are different from yours so I don't know which of these will help.

If you're using Windows, you can set text magnification system-wide to 100, 125, or 150%. I use 125%. This is in the control panel under either "display" or "personalization".

For Outlook, consider forcing all your email to plain text by default. You can then set the font size for that text. [My friend had complained that zoom levels didn't stick; she has to zoom each message. This works around that.] If you need to see formatting or embedded images, you can, for an individual message, choose "show as HTML" from a control just above the message text. Plain-text email is sometimes ugly because of the formatting you're not seeing, but I find it better than letting the sender choose fonts, font sizes, color, and, heaven help us, stationery. The "show as plain text" option is hidden in a very counter-intuitive place (thanks Microsoft!), at least in Outlook 2013 -- go to "trust center" and it's in there somewhere. Yes plain text is a way to avoid malicious Javascript, but I think of it more as an accessibility setting or something that should at least be mentioned under "email settings". We got new domain accounts recently and it took forever for me to find that again.

I have found no way to adjust the size of the header fields (including subject line) on individual messages -- very frustrating. You can change the size of the text shown in a folder (like the inbox) under "view settings". You have to do it for every folder you care about (like you do to dismiss the reading pane) because Microsoft hates us.

I don't know if this will help you, but consider switching your color theme. Black text on a white, backlit background is actually pretty hard on the eyes. You can try one of the reverse-video themes but (a) they can be hard to get used to and (b) most of your web browsing won't use dark/reverse themes and will seem even harsher by comparison (more about browsing in a bit). What I did instead was to personalize the desktop theme to make the default white background a gentler light tan instead. This is all under display -> personalization in the control panel. That's for Windows; on a Mac you're SOL, unfortunately, because Apple knows what's right for everybody.

If that makes a difference for you, then take a look at your monitor's color settings. (I don't know if laptops have this, but external monitors will.) A different color temperature might help you. Also, look at your contrast and brightness settings; I personally find high contrast and lower brightness to be most comfortable, though I've heard others say the opposite works better for them. Leave one of them alone while you experiment with the other. If the lighting near you is under your control, that's another knob you can turn. (I can say about lighting upon request.)

About browsing... lots of sites out there are designed by people with perfect vision who never thought about the rest of us, and some of the results are horrid. (What is with this trendy "light gray text on white background" meme?) Very frustrating. You can set a minimum font size in your browser and you can zoom individual sites with ctrl+/ctrl- (ctrl0 to reset to 100%). Firefox and Chrome remember these settings for a site; I don't know offhand if IE and Edge do. Some sites don't play as well with zoom as others -- maybe it makes the page too wide for your browser window and you now have horizontal scrolling, or maybe it uses a "responsive" design and moves things around on you. There are addons that let you force your own CSS on a site (Stylus) or apply your own Javascript to a site (Tampermonkey), but be warned that you will find yourself tinkering with settings often to respond to that shiny new thing your favorite site's designer came up with. I can pontificate at more length about browsers if you want.

comments

responsive design: do pixels even mean anything?

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 03:06:54 GMT

I don't know a lot about the nuts and bolts of responsive design (the "how", I mean), but Stack Exchange is moving toward it so I'm starting to pay attention.

Meanwhile, my ancient tablet seems to be in its death throes, so I've started to look around at what's out there these days, and I realized something. I'm looking at some 10" tablets with resolutions like 2048x1536. My 30-inch monitor at work is something like 2500px wide. These are, of course, not even remotely the same size pixels. Pixels have always varied with the size of the monitor, of course, but a ~10" tablet used to be in the range of 1024 or 1280 wide (landscape), not twice that.

I've seen discussions of SE's upcoming responsive design that say things like "and at widths under 900px it does this" and "the max width for the content area is (some number of pixels)".

How does this work? How can I see reasonable "real-world" sizing of things on both my big monitor and my tablet when designers are measuring things in pixels and tablets are doing crazy-dense things with pixels these days? I guess the same can be said of 4k displays (which I don't have). Do these ultra-dense devices somehow tell the browser "no, really, treat me as half that for layout purposes"? On a tablet will I need to have tons of zoom -- but still struggle to see the actual application's controls, because those don't zoom when you make content bigger?

I must be missing something obvious. Anybody want to enlighten me?

comments

driving UX

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 02:04:36 GMT

When driving to work I pass a couple of those digital highway signs that tend to say things like "est. travel time to downtown: N miles, M minutes" or "stadium parking use exit X" or "accident slow traffic ahead". When they have nothing better to say, they dispense pithy advice.

This morning's message was "click it or ticket". Setting aside the cries of linguistic outrage from unbalanced conjunctive operands, I found myself thinking about why, these days, anybody doesn't use a seat belt. I've lived through the progression from "not always present" to lap belts to those two-part (front-seat) belts where you clicked a lap belt and the shoulder piece slid into place when you turned the car on to today's norm of a single belt with two parts (lap and harness). The current ones are easy to use. I always use a seat belt and expect drivers to wait for me to fasten it when I'm a passenger. And yet, there's a problem.

An article in Consumer Reports not long ago noted that while people say they don't wear them because they're uncomfortable, their testers were able to find comfortable positions "so long as you're not a short woman with a large bust".

Um, yeah.

So how do you address that? I always fasten my seat belt, and a part of me wonders, were I to get into an accident that wouldn't have been fatal, if my seat belt is going to snap my neck or something. The height of the anchor point for that upper part is adjustable -- and there is no setting that gets it low enough to sit on my shoulder rather than alongside my neck. I don't have this problem when I'm a passenger; the seat is usually pushed back farther. (Which you would think would make it worse because the belt goes up, but it's hard to inspect while using it.) But when I'm driving I've got to be able to reach the pedals, so the seat is fairly far forward.

Is there some safe way I can hack this aspect of my car? I wondered about sitting higher (I don't think I can raise the seat, but maybe a cushion?), but if my legs are higher the seat needs to be even farther forward, and we're also trying to not be right on top of the airbag.

comments

followup: Stack Exchange user-interface changes

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 18:05:33 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote about a Stack Exchange design change that made the site much harder for me to use. I wrote a post about it that got a lot of attention -- which led to a meeting invitation from the relevant product manager. We had a very productive conversation, after which they fixed the main problems I reported (and one that came up during our meeting). Woot! Calm-but-firm user feedback works sometimes.

The meeting was supposed to include one of the designers, but time zones are hard. The product manager and I spent the better part of an hour talking about the design, use cases, the need for responsive design, vision problems, and so on. Through screen-sharing, I showed him what things were problems for me, what I was using user scripts or CSS overrides to get around (but I can't do that on my tablet), what I was just having to put up with, and what site functions I was just ignoring because they're too hard now. While it's not about the top bar (the specific UI change that led to this meeting), I pointed out a problem that basically means I can't do some key moderation tasks on any mobile device. (No word yet on whether they're going to fix that.) Along the way we bumped into a couple things where, apparently, normal people see some color differentiation that I couldn't see, and he said they'd work on that. He shared some of their then-future plans for the top bar and asked for feedback. He said they are trying to move to responsive design, which will make a lot of things better, but we both know that's a big change for a site that wasn't designed that way from the start.

This UI change has been quite contentious among the larger user community. Some users are, sadly, being quite rude about it. I'm glad that, against that backdrop, someone was willing to take the time to try to understand and address the problems I was facing with the new design. I'm one of about 15 million users and about 500 moderators, and nonetheless I was worth a few hours of somebody's time. Courtesy of course matters, but even with courtesy I'm usually brushed off, not engaged, when part of a large user base somewhere.

This is actually my fourth^* significant meeting (not email, not site chat, but synchronous meeting) with SE employees -- two community managers, one VP (escalating a problem), and now this product manager. All have left me feeling that the employees in question really cared about me as a user and moderator, and most of them resulted in my problems being fixed. I'm pretty impressed.

^* I was also interviewed by a member of the design team for the now-ended Documentation product, I think because of this post I wrote about some planned changes there. That was them doing user research (for which they paid me), not me bringing something to them. And I once interviewed for a job there, but that's different.

comments

user interfaces are hard, but this isn't even trying...

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 21:05:56 GMT

Wow, that was convoluted. Having solved the problem, I'm recording it here for future-me or anybody else out there who stumbles across this post when in need.

Like everybody else, I've been getting lots of spam calls on my cell phone, most of which use caller-ID to lie (no you are not local...) or mask their identities. I don't answer calls from numbers I don't recognize, but it's still annoying.

Sometime in the last several weeks, my phone (ZTE Axon 7 running Android Nougat) offered me some settings for dealing with incoming spam, including a shiny checkbox for blocking calls from private numbers. I've never gotten a legitimate call from a private number on my cell phone, so I checked it.

Yesterday I was in a Google Hangout with somebody, which involved much audio fail that I will save for another time. Rather than continue to debug while the clock was ticking, I said "hey, how 'bout I join the hangout from my phone?" (so, using video and screen-sharing from my computer and phone for audio). I couldn't figure out how to join the hangout. No problem, someone on the other end said, I'll invite you by phone.

Except he blocks his phone number, so his calls were auto-rejected before I even had a chance to pick up. Bloody nuisance. Hey look -- my first legitimate private call!

We solved the hangout problem, but afterwards I wanted to turn off that setting. And could find nothing in my phone settings. That checkbox was nowhere to be found. I went to the rejected call in my call log, found a settings menu, and chose "unblock", but doing that has no effect. (Next time I looked, it was blocked again.)

Some googling told me that I was probably dealing with an app named Hiya, which ZTE apparently bundles with Android. The app doesn't show up in the usual place where you go to launch apps, though. Some more googling led me to Settings -> Apps -> System Apps, where I found it -- but my choices were force-stop and disable, but no "run" or "open".

Ok Hiya, you are -- somewhere! -- holding some configuration settings hostage. Out with it!

More googling led me to this comment explaining how to open the Hiya app: find a blocked-call notification in the log (an actual number, not "private") and open it, which brings up a "limited" part of the Hiya app. This limited app includes settings, so I was finally able to find my way to that checkbox and uncheck it.

Who thought that was a good idea? Un-freaking-believable. Is it so hard to include a hook for Hiya settings somewhere in the phone app (which it is obviously modifying already)?

It's possible I'll need this information again within the lifetime of this phone and I sure won't remember that. Hence this post.

comments

usability struggles

Wed, 20 Sep 2017 03:35:06 GMT

I spend a lot of time on, and am a volunteer moderator for, several Stack Exchange sites. (Mi Yodeya is one of them.) SE has a banner ("top bar") that is the same across all sites. It contains notifications, information about the logged-in user, and some key navigation links. For moderators it contains a few more things relevant to that job.

Until recently it looked like this (non-moderator view):

The red counter is the inbox (waiting messages) and the green one is reputation changes. If there aren't any, you just get the gray icons that those alerts are positioned over. If I were a moderator on that site, there'd be a diamond to the left of my user picture and a blue square with the flag count to the left of that.

They've just changed this design. (Well, the change is rolling out.) Here's what it looks like now (for a moderator):

The most important links for moderation are the last two things, the diamond and the blue box with the number (flags). They're on the far right, where they're less likely to be seen for various reasons. (Non-moderators don't get those indicators.)

In the old design, those moderator indicators -- which are important -- were toward the center where they're easier to see. Also, all the numbers were a little bigger and easier to see.

When this was announced there was a lot of immediate discussion in the moderators-only chat room, during which I got a little upset about the reduced usability, especially those moderator controls -- which had a good chance of being scrolled away in a not-huge browser window, because SE doesn't use responsive design. After I calmed down I wrote a post on Meta about how this was going to make it harder for me to do my volunteer job, particularly with vision challenges. I expected to get a few sympathy votes, some "get a bigger monitor" snark (which wouldn't help, by the way), and no results.

That post is now one of my highest-scoring posts on the network. And I have a meeting with the product manager and a designer at SE next week to demonstrate my difficulties in using this in more detail.

Meanwhile, I've gotten some help with userscripts from some other moderators. It's hacky and a little buggy and it slows down page loads and I have no idea how to adjust some things, but at least I can see my notifications and the moderator stuff is in a better place. It'll do for now.

I sure hope I can get them to bake some of this in, though. The page-load delay is a little disconcerting as stuff jumps around on the screen. (Also, userscripts do not work on my Android tablet.)

Beyond the immediate problem, though, what I really hope for is to find some way to raise a little awareness that usability is hard, designers are not the users, there are all kinds of people with all kinds of usage patterns and constraints, and you need to somehow, systematically, figure out how to design for the larger audience. That's going to be the hard part.

comments