Just spent 3 hours helping an elderly neighbour try to get a parking permit online (unsuccessfully). An eye-opener on usability challenges people can face with navigating these systems.

I'll never look at a web interface in the same way again.

@lb_southwark it's not good enough

One example of the insanity:

"Enter mobile number to register" OK, 0793...

"You already have an account with that number"

"Enter mobile number to get recovery details" OK, 0793...

"You do not have an account with that number"

Turns out you have to put 44793...

FFS WHY!?

She didn't know what a 'tab' was, nor an address bar, struggled to find symbols on the keyboard. Password requirements were utterly bewildering to her.

This is the norm. What a fucking bubble I live in.

When I asked her to 'bring up her email' we had a very odd exchange for a good 10 minutes.

Turned out to send an email she googles an email address, clicks on any email address she can find, which brings up the email client

Why would she know any different? Who would teach her?

If I could list all the problems with Southwark's system (even if you're reasonably computer-literate) I would be here all day.

It's criminal, frankly.

As an aside, forget about IT security for these people. Her passwords were utterly guessable. When I advised her to shield her password in future because bad people might exploit it she was amazed I knew it.

Her password was her first name in caps.

I myself was confused by her apple mouse. When I asked how she scrolled down, she said she 'sort of massaged it', and then demostrated by wiggling and clicking it randomly. Eventually I figured out you had to stroke it. (I've always loathed apple mice for these reasons).

She felt the need to read everything on every page, slowly. Needless to say, this is completely impractical.

Every time she tried to fill out a form, the concept of focus on its elements was time and again a problem. eg she'd spent a great deal of time trying just to put her date of birth in. Just trying to choose her birth year from 120 years was a puzzle she couldn't solve.

One page had a captcha. Oh boy.

She couldn't read it at all, so I had to read it out to her.

She kept accidentally clicking on refresh, even while she was typing it.

She couldn't fully grasp that she had to click on the text field before she typed it in.

I want to make clear that she's not dull or stupid. She's just not been in the workplace for a number of years, and afaict has no one to teach her this stuff.

Some pages had multiple 'Submit' buttons for separate forms. She couldn't understand why hitting the wrong 'submit' was a problem, or even what had gone wrong at all.

The 'register your account' page requires you to put your card details in (CVV2 and all).

It tries to make a payment (no warning!) of 0.00, which is then flagged by HSBC, and the card is disabled.

For the love of God, why @lb_southwark ??

This triggered an SMS to be sent to her by HSBC. She didn't understand what it meant, and thought it was a scam, so ignored it.

Once I persuaded her it was real, she replied to the text. She was unclear on the difference between a text and a whatsapp message, another confusion.

Then she got a call from HSBC, which got a voicemail, sending her another SMS. She had no idea what to do with the SMS, nor how to retrieve the voicemail. Once she did, she panicked as she couldn't remember the number she was supposed to phone back on.

Once we got the number, she tried to phone back. Her phone provider told her she had run out of money for her account.

She asked me imploringly 'do you know how to fix this?'

I then tried to explain about mobile providers and different account types, and realised this was all alien to her. In her mind, there's just BT and everyone has the same kind of deal, and that's it.