A few years ago, I spent a few weeks driving around New Zealand’s south island. Public Wi-Fi seems mostly unavailable in the South Pacific, so I relied on a prepaid SIM card for connectivity during that trip. This shouldn’t have been particularly memorable, but, after spending hours attempting hotel bookings on sites that clearly weren’t optimized for my mobile phone, the experience is still fresh in my mind. I remember a lot of frustration, pinching and zooming to see minuscule form fields. I remember attempting to resubmit the form multiple times because I missed a field while zoomed in. I also remember this experience costing me more than just my time. We make decisions as we design and build sites. Sometimes we decide in favour of approaches that meet our needs but cause grief for our end users. Those practices need to die. Let’s talk about them.
