I had a bad experience: The Net

Why are all the government secrets one mouse click away?

The world is full of bad User Experience. Here’s an example:

In 1995 The Net with Sandra Bullock came to theaters, and offered the general public a fantastic thriller based on the premise that all of our lives are now controlled digitally. People with the know-how and access can break us with information, and ruin our very real lives with virtual interactions. It was a roller coaster, and in the infancy of the internet, it foreshadowed problems of identity theft that have been realized.

To summarize, with thanks to imdb.com:
Angela Bennett works from home for Cathedral Software, developer of a universally used security program, “Gatekeeper”. She lives a reclusive life on her computer, with few friends who even know what she looks like. She finds a “glitch” in one of Cathedral’s games, and spends the rest of the movie pursued by a secret group intent on killing her for seeing the sensitive information (government secrets and so on) revealed as she inspected the software. SPOILER ALERT: They don’t kill Sandra Bullock. She gets her life back instead.

The design problem is this: It wasn’t her extensive computer hacking skills that exposed this data. In fact, it wasn’t really in her capacity as a programmer at all. Instead, she’s faced with a login screen to the US Department of Energy’s Atomic Energy Comission, and clicks on a “π” symbol in the lower right corner. Black symbol, light green background. Plain as day. Then without any other security measure, all of the secrets in the world explode onto her screen. Unlimited access. And she only clicked one, very obvious button.

Again, to summarize: these titans of security have developed a gateway to access the most sensitive data in the world for their nefarious purposes, and hid it behind the fourth most obvious element on a common log-in screen.

Couldn’t the world have hidden behind one of this set?

Or this set?

I even made it easy and showed you which one to click.
An extra five minutes of that designer’s time would’ve saved Angela Bennett a harrowing near-death experience, and the presumably high cost of hiring a hit man to chase her for weeks. Poor designer probably lost his job over that.

Moral of the story: if your website has the potential to make users fight for their lives if they click in the wrong place, don’t put it on the homepage.

Please, won’t someone think of the users.