I’ve posted in the past regarding my somewhat Luddite tendencies. I don’t HATE technology - I just don’t really enjoy interacting with it. And I really find it difficult when something I’ve interacted with seamlessly for decades changes such that I can’t even find the information I want.
Just this morning, I tried to get an estimate on retirement income from my work savings program (basically like a 4011k). This is something I’ve done with no problem at all at least once a year for at least 2 decades.
First off, they said my work computer browser wouldn’t work. So I used my personal laptop. Why on earth would my workplace NOT have my work computer equipped to access a work-administered program? But not a big problem.
Then there was a need to sign on with new username/password and 2-step notification etc. OK, I understand that. And it wasn’t too difficult.
But then I get to the main page. The old page had ALL of the limited information I’m interested in on the first page, in colored pie charts. Balances, contributions, and such. There was a date window, where you could check your balance/distrubutions for any date. And a clear button to open a retirement income estimator.
The new page had NONE of this information - other than the current balance. Bottomline, I spent 30 minutes, and I could not find the info I wanted.
I didn’t come here just to bitch about this one website. And I suspect I’ve posted similar rants here in the past. I was hoping some of you might be able to offer some simple strategies or mindsets I could try to adopt to try to improve my interaction with tech such as this.
I’ve found that filling half-gallon plastic milk jugs with water, hanging them from an overhead branch with a rope, then punching them until they burst open is rather helpful in coping with the frustration.
I have this same problem with my bank. They just won’t leave their damn web portal alone and instead have to keep changing its appearance and behavior.
If it’s the same organization (i.e. the financial institution involved) that changed their public-facing pages, I would contact them (I think email is better than phoning, then you have it all in writing) explaining your problems and asking for their help. The usual case is that they rolled out the changes without a) thoroughly testing them, and b) caring about the impact on the users (i.e. you). Make them as miserable as you are, within your power to do so, and maybe, just maybe, one of the technocrats will remember, next time, that users matter.
This does take time, but there’s no reason you should suffer alone.
I will add that my last 20 years at work involved being user liaison for our department systems with the IT department. During that time we went from “we can’t do that” to “tell us what you want and help us design it.” It was a very satisfying change.
I think the problem comes from managers seeing a really cool website and wanting their website to look similar. Problem is that cool website was a restaurant whose layout doesn’t translate well to a bank.
This is the federal government’s Thrift Savings Plan. Not a bank. I really doubt I could do ANYTHING that would have any effect on them.
IME, the fed govt has a pretty consistent track record of being a very slow adopter of the least user friendly software. Usually, I expect as much. So I just figure out how to lear new methods which are generally only slightly more cumbersome with little/no benefit. This one was just kinda shocking.
It is kinda a thing where I feel if I spent hours every day dicking around with my computer/phone, I’d get better at these sorts of things. But I have NO INTEREST in dicking around with my computer/phone…
Personally, I have difficulty “seeing” things that aren’t obvious. Drop down menus and hamburgers can almost make things invisible to me - tho I’ve gotten better. The idea that some icon r design is clickable just doesn’t make sense to me - I’m quite adept at dealing w/ words and #s. The idea of swiping my phone screen to see hidden stuff just doesn’t seem to jibe with my brain. Especially when my interests impress me as generally among the most simplistic and obvious applications.
I worked at a Fortune 500 for several years, and now and then, they would drastically “update” an employee application that we were all used to. You’d log in, and all the screens had changed with little on the screen to tell you where the information was now hidden. They had a huge IT department (they were an IT company) and spent countless thousands of dollars creating easy-to-understand YouTube-ish tutorials that painstakingly showed you where everything now was. You had to invest the time and watch the tutorials, but all of the information was still there, just in a different place. I have no idea why they needed to update everything every few years, but I guess someone thought this new way was way better and more intuitive than the old way. It rarely was.
I offer the following in case any of them are helpful, but please don’t interpret them to mean that I don’t sympathize with your plight:
Think of it as a computer game or puzzle, where you have to look for clues and try different things to figure out how to solve it and get what you want.
Thank them for changing things around, because it helps you to stay mentally young and flexible.
If you think technology’s bad, try interacting with people. They don’t come with clear instructions, they don’t always say or do or expect the same things as the last time you interacted with them, and sometimes you have to interact with completely new people that you’re not familiar with.
About all I can say is that nowadays most websites are being redesigned to work better on phones than on desktops. So try interacting with it on your phone instead and suddenly the changes may make more, not less, sense. May.
Here’s an analogy. When you call the 800 number for a bank or whatever, inevitably the first 8 choices on the menu are stupid. And automated. By which I mean that a) only a very clueless customer would want that info, and b) the computer can easily provide it without needing to involve an expensive human. Since I only call my bank (or whatever) when I want to do something complicated that absolutely positively requires a human, 100% of that design is an obstacle to my success. But they’ve carefully optimized that menu tree based on the actual stupid crap that actual stupid customers want to do. Every second a customer is on the phone costs them money. So #1 on the menu is the most common question people ask, #2 is next most common, etc.
As applied to your TSP website, whatever comes up on the home page is the most common question people want answered. And whatever choices you can find by links in the text or under the hamburger menu are the next most common. etc.
All modulo how skilled or clueless the IT team behind the website is.
The bottom line being that a LOT of what’s wrong with websites and phone trees is the idiot users and the careful efforts by the business to learn what the idiots want and deliver that as cheaply as possible. We have met the enemy and it’s our fellow customers. Idjits most of 'em.
Yes, the “make things invisible” trend has been happening for some time now. I blame Apple. Hidden elements that only show up when you know to mouse over them is not intuitive, but here we are.
This is my suggestion for using these pages, I’m sure I’m missing things other people can fill in:
Look at the text on top for a link to what you want
Look at the text on the bottom for what you want
Look for a hamburger to expand into a menu
Look for three dots to expand
Look for a circle with your avatar or initials to expand
Search google for the information the site, and within the last year or six months
If you don’t see what you want, follow the links that are available, and repeat the process.
A slight variation, it’s the most common question the company thinks people want answered, or even worse, it’s the information the company wants you to know. I’m sure we’ve all seen FAQs that are 6 versions of “how can I give you more money?” without a single “my thing broke, who do I talk to?”
This. Get used to hamburger menus. Learn them, live them, love them. Click on the non-descript hamburger first … THEN view the various options (in text) that you can click on. Less and less often will options be initially spelled out for you in text as was typical on the pre-smartphone Internet.
Look for these hamburger menus all over the place. Charcoal hamburger menu on black background? To the developer, it’s totally on the user to intuitively find that. At least 9,999 times out of 10,000, hamburger menus appear somewhere along the top of a webpage – that, you can pretty much count on.
Forgot about the “three dots” and the “round circle” … yes, also important on the smartphone-era Net.
…
It’s going to be weird in the near future when all of the smartphone-era iconography is replaced by whatever’s coming next. The Demolition Man writers weren’t really joking about the “three seashells” thing … only that it looks to be coming (continuously throughout the near future) in digital form.
All I can say is: It will not stop, it’s not being done with your best interests in mind, and you have no recourse. You need to be 100% clear on this from the outset. Adapt and accept.
A slightly more useful tidbit is: I tend to get drilled into my own idiosyncratic workflow and want to do things my own way. But websites are typically designed to help the average user - not average in terms of skill, but as an average, where do people seem to struggle the most? Try to figure out what they’re doing for that “average” user, and try to become average.
If the thing you used constantly is tucked away behind 4 other screens, there is a decent chance (not a guarantee) that you have a usage habit that most people don’t have, and there might be a better way to do it. Or the company has simply decided you need to do it this way. Or none of the above. But it’s worth considering.
I think what we’ve seen in the past 5-10 years is a sort of UI design unification between mobile devices and desktop applications.
Prior to this, they were more or less divergent - desktop apps all had their own basic design, which tended to be a strip menu across the top (Home, File, Edit, etc…) and mobile devices had a different, but similar sort of interface. And apps/websites weren’t always the same either, even on desktops.
Now they’re all kind of unified- hamburger menus, standardized iconography, etc…
But if you’re used to something else, it can be confusing. The thing to remember is that in all likelihood, everything you used to do is still there, just maybe not in the exact same place or way to get to it.
I think revision of expectations is in order as well; don’t expect websites/apps/etc… to stay static. Expect to have to learn periodically. Interfaces will change. Often for the better, if you can learn and give them a chance.
Eventually this stuff will settle out and interfaces will stabilize and remain unchanged for the most part, like they do for most consumer products.
I have tried to explain to people that flowchart is exactly how we do it. The people who need that kind of explanation still don’t get it. Some people can’t follow the simplest of directions must less the kind with decisions.