Who am I? I seem to
be primarily a “Victim of Bad Web Design” as I suffer a lot from badly designed
web pages, email attachments etc. I have hesitated to write about this on this
blog – does it not increase the diversity of the topics covered? Today I
decided to go ahead. No point in
starting a separate blog. I will get better attention to the comment by putting
it into my main blog. Besides, most people who come to a blog post are anyway those
who do a Web search for an appropriate keyword.
My pain today is
from a bank which seems to label statements with what looks like a
20 digit random number! I am sure that there is some structure in the number,
but it does not clearly indicate which bank or card provider sent it. I had downloaded it and deleted the email because I keep my inbox clean. Like many other users, I do not rename the downloaded file
immediately or file it into the correct folder. I believe it is in the User’s
Bill of Rights that he does not have to be very systematic person. On the other
hand, the Bill of Rights says that those who design communications to be sent
to a few hundred thousand users need to be very thoughtful professionals. Then
only they can serve a large user group properly.
Today’s pain arises
because I look at a file with a name that looks something like “31783476586145984_982375.PDF”
in my “downloads” folder. I cannot open it because it asks for a password;
which password I don’t know because I have forgotten the company that sent the
file as an attachment to its email. That email has been deleted and I cannot
even find it in the trash folder. The trash must have been emptied after file
was downloaded and the email deleted. You can say it is my fault! I don’t deny
it, but is it wrong to ask that designers should give proper titles to files?
Are designers involved? Or is some banker writing his own software after 2:30
PM when customers are not allowed into his branch?
Finally, is it too
much to say that the problem would not have existed if the file name had been
FLY_BY_76586145984_982375.PDF? I would have guessed that it had come from the
Fly by Night Bank Ltd!
Srinivasan Ramani
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