Paul Annett

To most, I’m a Web Designer. Within the industry, my job title is the more niche “User Experience Designer”. That means it’s my job not only to design websites, but to ensure the experience of using them is a pleasant and easy one.

Part of my role includes labelling: choosing which words get used for which tasks to make a message easier to understand. For instance, I’d never put a “submit” button at the end of a contact form (its a very techy and unfriendly word), my button would say something more personable and hopefully easier for everyone to understand, like “send it now”. (my friend Stuart has pointed out to me that the comments form on this very blog has a ’submit’ button. my excuse? I’ve used a pre-made template for this website, as I’m such a web design perfectionist that my own design for the site is in its fifth iteration and I’m so far not happy enough with it to launch it!!)

This is a practice which should be applied in many offline situations too, and it was whilst driving to Lewes today that I noticed what appalling labelling we have on UK road works signs.

First, I spotted “Adverse camber” and wasn’t exactly sure what it meant. I knew the camber is the shape of the road, usually curving up to the middle. Since the traffic was being channelled across to the ‘wrong’ side of the road, I assumed the camber would become opposite to normal… but I wasn’t sure that’s what the sign meant. My passenger, an English Language graduate, expected ‘adverse’ to mean difficult (from a slightly inaccurate definition of ‘adversity’). In actual fact, there was very little change in the road surface so the sign wasn’t even needed. But if it had been, perhaps a better wording would be “road tips to right”.

Secondly, I saw some sort of crane bearing the warning “Caution: operatives in road”. Why “operatives”? Why not the more common (and less confusing) “operators”, or (the much less confusing) “men”. Presumably, in today’s world of political correctness they can’t say “men”. But in a potentially dangerous situation where the safety of your workers depends on a message being conveyed to drivers quickly and clearly, “men in road” could be life-savingly faster to understand than “operatives in road”.

For more on this topic, read “Airport User Experience“, a blog post by Andy Budd.

We received a T-Mobile phone bill yesterday, delivered and addressed to someone we don’t know, but at our flat. Being a good-natured chap I decided to call customer services to do them the favour of correcting the information they held on their database.

I gave them our address and the name of the account holder, careful not to give them my own name for fear of the outstanding balance somehow becoming my responsibility. I explained that I’d never heard of this person, and if they could remove my address from their account then that would be great.

As far as I was concerned that was the end of the conversation and I could get back to a busy morning feeding the baby. They had different ideas, and got quite stern with me when I tried to end the call.

Firstly, they wanted me to declare that I didn’t know the person named on the bill. That was fine, as I don’t.

Secondly I had to declare that I have never entered into an agreement with T-Mobile. The thing is, before I switched to Orange they were my mobile network of choice, so I couldn’t declare this truthfully… but I did want to get to the end of the call, and after all they didn’t have my personal details, so I agreed.

Lastly, they wanted me to agree to them storing my personal information in their databases and sharing my data with other parties to prevent fraud! And that information would include my name, address, and mother’s maiden name!!

What kind of madness is this? To “prevent fraud” I have to give them my mother’s maiden name (obviously, the answer to a common security question), and in return they’ll give me nothing. I could understand them needing some kind of security question if, perhaps, I was becoming a T-Mobile customer, but not in this scenario.

Needless to say I refused, and just sent the bill back to them marked “not known at this address”. Serves me right for trying to do the right thing.

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A footnote about security questions: I registered with Game today. Rather than asking for your mother’s maiden name, they allow a completely free choice for both your security question and answer. Inspired by PaulyG’s hilarious blog post on setting appropriate security questions, I now can’t wait to phone their helpdesk just to hear their confusion!

Just read about a supposed time traveller who has returned to our time from 2036, where the world has been ravaged by nuclear war. It would be nice to think he’s genuine and that time travel is possible (although that would obviously mean death to us all, so maybe not that nice) so this document is provided so that we can asses the validity of his claims, if and when they happen.

2004/2005 for civil war in America, anyone? From what we see on the news and what Michael Moore has to say, it doesn’t seem too improbable.