The world's first website was launched almost 20 years ago, and there are more than 250 million of them today, but why are so many of them so painfully difficult to use? As an internet user I am driven to distraction by lazy interface design, poor visual communication and ill-designed websites; it seems that here in Hong Kong things are particularly bad.
I imagine that you, like me, are familiar with the following miserable scenario. You are online and trying to book tickets or buy flowers or find someone's phone number. Your time, like mine and everyone else's, is extremely precious. You have found a website which seems to offer what you need, but after a quick click around your hopes are dashed. You can't find the information you need. You can't work out how to place your order. You can't even find your way back to the homepage. So you give up. You pick up the phone, fill in and fax an order form, dispatch a carrier pigeon or a camel train or do whatever else it is that people did before everything became so horribly difficult, sometime in the nineties.
I realise that this is my second post recently with the word hate in the title and I don't want you to draw any hasty conclusions about my mental health but I feel strongly about the web and yes, that does involve hating some things.