I’ve been wrestling with a particularly horrible website system in recent days*, and it is making me so incredibly irritated, that I am inspired to dust off this blog and write a post so that YOU TOO, can create a system that is as horrible as this one for people like me. While writing pieces of this complaint-post, I also had to navigate a particularly awful phone system to call my credit card company, so I’ve woven in some suggestions from that delightful experience here, too.
Because I have ADHD, multi-step instructions are a real challenge, especially when they have to be done in a particular order, and/or when different steps affect one another, or there are minor details that matter.
For example, I recently drove to SDSU and located a particular parking lot that I was directed to park in (step 1), and called the person I was meeting once I got there (step 3), but completely failed to notice step 2, which was to park in a particular marked area at said parking garage. I had read through the texts that gave me all this information, but my brain just deleted the middle part, so I got the garage and panicked when I saw all the different choices for various types of marked spaces. Luckily, my friend didn’t get annoyed that they had to give me the information AGAIN they had already given me (or maybe they did but didn't yell at me), but I did feel rather embarrassed when I looked back at the texts and noticed the information was there.
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| Photographic evidence I am not incompetent...I just think about stuff differently. (This is midway through replacing the Tacoma door handle, and teaching the kid how to do so as well). |
Anyway, In no particular order, here are the key factors to include when designing your online system to make sure that people with ADHD cannot possibly succeed in getting through:
1. Use cryptic language. For example, provide a yes or no button to ask if the person submitting your form also wants to be considered an "executive signatory", and add a line of small text “explaining” this selection by saying “selecting ‘yes’ indicates that you would like to be an executive signatory”. Do not explain what an executive signatory is!
2. Ensure there are as many steps as possible. If your process is relatively straightforward, you can maximize the number of steps by requiring the same information be entered multiple times in slightly different ways. Be creative with your wording to re-ask the same questions in increasingly confusing ways, too!
3. Make sure the system will not save progress, and all entries must be completed in one go.
4. Instead of having fillable fields for things like “county”, or a drop-down menu that can be scrolled, use a search-based system: require the user to type the name of the county, and then wait for at least 2-3 minutes for the system to search for said county, so the user can select it. This is about 200 times longer than ADHD user will be able to wait without doing something else, which will increase the chances that they will be distracted by the new thing and forget they were working on the submission. Then they will get to start over again, since progress will not save and the system will time out.
5. Add a small-print disclaimer that the search will take a while because the search lists are large. ADHD users will assume that this means about 10 seconds, so will repeatedly close out the system and restart, and try different browsers until they just try waiting an absurdly long time for the system to search through 58 entire counties.
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| Actual photo of me after completing the permit form, 75 years after I started. |
6. Be prepared to receive emails asking if the system is broken. Sanguinely reply that it just requires patience, knowing this is something that people with ADHD tend to lack. Feel free to cackle like an evil villain while you type this reply.
7. Use the same search-based fields for more specific locations, but don’t populate the search with logical locations (for example, leave out the names of cities as choices). This will require the user to repeatedly guess at entries that might work, waiting several minutes for each entry to come back with “no results”. Surely this will cause them to give up, or throw their computer out a window. Consider investing in computer-repair services across the state.
8. Make sure to add in a time-out feature. If the user has not interacted with the website in, let’s say 5 minutes, automatically revert back to the starting screen (erasing all progress), with a cheerful “good-bye!” message.
✌☺✌
9. On the system login screen, write “select your sign-in method” and then only provide one method.
10. On your initial post-login screen, provide at least 8 selectable options, that all look identical. Even though 99% of users want to selection option 7, hide this amongst the others in a random order and give it a confusing name. For example, do not call it “start here” or “enter system” or “log in” – that is too obvious. Instead, use a term such as “my applications.” This will confuse new ADHD users, who tend to be overly rational, and have not yet started an application.
11. Once the user goes through each selection one by one and eventually decides they should probably start at the “my applications” page, don’t provide a button to start a new application here. Instead, only provide links to several different how-to pdf documents for each type of application, each at least 30 pages long.
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| Too many instructions |
12. Set things up so that the user must first go to the “my profiles” page and populate a profile (getting confused about why a person would have more than one, given they are a single person), which is similar to the system registration page to set up a login, but requires just *slightly* more information. After the user has done this, set up the system so that a new option (hidden amongst the others) will pop up on the “my applications” page that will actually allow them to start a new application.
13. Do not provide explanatory instructions next to buttons, links, or terms (those little “i” buttons that provide concise, direct information relevant to a particular item are way too helpful for ADHD users. Since we are trying to exclude them, make sure they have to dig out the information buried somewhere in one of the several 30+ page long pdf documents).
14. Only use slightly different confusing language to explain your confusing terminology and step-by-step instructions for the application in your hefty pdf documents. Leave out explanations for terms that make no sense (a sense of mystery will make it “fun”!). You can have a friend proof-read your instructions to make sure they seem like they are explaining what to do to an untrained user, but actually require significant background knowledge and/or lucky guessing. ADHD users, who already struggle to follow clear and straightforward directions, will lose their minds!
15. If you decide to have an automated phone system people can call for help, be sure to have many, many menus to get through, so that it takes at least 6 minutes to reach a human being and/or reach the end of a menu branch that will give the caller the information they are seeking (or, alternatively, to start over and try again because they failed). After each menu selection, be sure to add in a long pause (at least 20 seconds) before the next automated list – and do not fill this pause with any reassuring sounds, just silence. This will similarly make the ADHD caller think the call has been dropped, so they will have to call back and repeat the menu-navigation all over again.
I thought originally I might leave this post anonymized, so you might not know what particularly egregious system might have inspired me to finally write again, but I can’t help it. It’s this one. And the credit card? Chase. So bad.
*Actually not recent. I decided to wait to post this until I’d successfully gotten the permit and thus might not have it denied out of spite for my complaints here (not that anyone would notice, didn’t want to jinx it. Then I forgot I wrote this…).
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