95% Invisible

Confused? Keep reading and things will become clear.

I wanted to entitle this article 99% Invisible. However, that might confuse readers who are fans of Roman Mars’ great podcast of the same name. So, I have shrunk the title, numerically speaking, to 95% Invisible.

The noted graphic designer Michael Bierut once observed that an exit sign which is hard to read is dysfunctional. By that standard, a significant amount of modern consumer design is dysfunctional.

I generally prefer minimalism in style. The less obtrusive, the more attractive. However, in the last decade or two, the increasing dominance of the minimalist aesthetic in size and color, particularly with websites and electronic paraphernalia, has reached the point where function is impaired. And who bears the brunt of this? Senior citizens like me.

According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, presbyopia (farsightedness) afflicts nearly everyone over the age of 50. Print on medicine bottles which was once easily readable becomes impossible to decipher. People are relegated to using more and more powerful reading glasses. How large a segment of the American population is over 50 years old? As of 2010, it was 34% … and that percentage is growing.

I have no statistics on who designs websites, computer cables and simple manuals, but I would guess that the mean age is around 30 years. Presbyopia is not part of these designers’ life experience. Perhaps in the back of their minds they have a vague sense that vision deteriorates with age, but you can’t tell by looking at their work.

Let’s start off with the simple manuals that accompany the wonderful array of small gadgets available to us today. Take for example the one below, which is for a car cellphone holder.

The problems with the manual are obvious. First, the font size. It’s only about an 8 pt (point). To give you some perspective, newspapers are usually published in 10 pt. The second problem is with the clarity of the print. It is a thin, pale, almost ghostlike gray, set off against an off-white background.

Is this a sleek design? Certainly. Is it easily readable? Obviously not. Can I address the issue by using reading glasses? No.

Compare the cellphone holder directions to the pamphlet for the bicycle lights I recently purchased. The font is only slighter bigger, but the contrast between the font and the paper is markedly higher. The result is a set of directions that even I can read (with my reading glasses, of course). Could the manufacturer have done better? Of course, but at my stage in life, you take what you get in the field of graphic design.

The bicycle lights are cleverly designed. There is a mini-USB port built into the side of each device. So, when the lights start to dim, you can simply recharge them, rather than discard the lights or buy a new battery. And the manufacturer was quite generous, providing not only an extra set of straps for attaching the lights but also two USB cables. But therein lies another problem, this one dealing with the cables. And it’s not just the USB cables for these lights. It’s all USB cables.

Let’s start with Apple products. There is no problem with the lightning end of the cable. It fits into your device no matter which way you plug it in. But the USB end — that’s another story. There are two ways to insert it into your device. Only one way works.

This problem is compounded with USB cables for non-Apple devices. Each end has only one correct way to attach it. So, every time you plug in both ends of the cable, you have a 25% chance of doing it correctly.

Wait, you say. Just look carefully at the ends of the cable. But why should one even be required to take this step? This problem is exacerbated when you are dealing with the mini-USB cables, which are ubiquitous today. Take a look at the picture below.

Can you tell which end of the USB cable should face up and which should face down? No. But if you look really, really closely, and have excellent vision, you might even see the following logo, which measures a resounding 3/8 of an inch in length.

Recognize it? Probably not. Do you know its name or significance? Almost certainly not. It’s sometimes referred to as Neptune’s Dreizack Trident, sort of a repetitive name, as dreizack means trident in German. (I guess Neptune was marginally bilingual). According to the internet, it signifies that the cable meets certain standards and adapts to multiple types of devices.

Now, this logo might be helpful in remembering which side of the USB cable end faces upwards. However, in order to serve that function, it would have to be easily visible. But that’s never the case. Why? Because it is always the same black color as the background. Would it be easier to see if, for example, it was printed in white against a black background? Certainly. But that, of course, would be at odds with the love of monochrome design.

When did this obsession with minimalist style arise? I don’t know, but it certainly drew impetus from Google’s elegant homepage. Take a look at Google’s 1999 homepage.

Google at the time was going against the grain. Many website homepages were literally strewn with hyperlinks. Take for example the 1999 homepage for Yahoo!, which in that year commanded a far larger share of the search market than Google.

Yahoo’s homepage is a great example of hyperlinks run wild. There are over 120 of them on its homepage. It is the antithesis of elegance.

The love of simple, clean design is apparent in countless websites. The problem is that sometime form takes precedence over function.

Let’s start off with Warby Parker, the company that revolutionized the retailing of eyeglasses. Here’s their sign-in page. (Unfortunately, due to Medium’s limitations in sizing inserted files, it appears here significantly larger than on my Mac).

On the plus side, it provides visible boxes in which to input your username and password. But what’s written in that blue box? A little tough to read, more so when you look on the web. I can only think of the irony. This company may be losing business because those in need of its primary product — eyeglasses — might lack sufficient vision to read the words Sign in on the blue box.

The leading internet purveyor of eyeglasses could take a clue from the leading internet footwear purveyor, Zappos, on how to make a sign-in page that is user friendly to those with diminished vision.

As you click on the data entry box, a distinct border emerges, showing where to enter your information. And the words on the sign-in button are in a contrasting color to the background, resulting in an easy to read and easy to use sign-in page.

One of the Verizon Wireless log-in pages is particularly challenging.

There’s an outlined box for entering your password, but where do you put in your User ID? You click on the area by User ID but nothing happens.

Forget about Forgot Your Password. The company forgot to provide a way to input your User ID! You don’t believe me? Just click here to see.

And now to my final gripe. I don’t know what the technical term is, but I call it ghost print. Here’s an example from Brooks Brothers’ website:

It’s as though the website designers were given the assignment of designing a barely readable page. How do you go about doing so? First, you make the print very, very small. Then you compound the problem by minimizing the color difference between the words and the background.

This style has spread to the auto industry. Take for example the Prius. Let’s start with the lock buttons.

You may not believe me, but they are there. Can you tell, without blowing up the picture, which is the lock and which is the unlock button?

Now let’s compare the dashboards of the 2015 and 2020 models.

Let’s look first at the 2015 model, which is on the left. The buttons for off and auto, and to a slightly lesser extent park (P) are easy to read. There is reasonable contrast between the letters and the background. Now take a look at some of the buttons on the 2020 Model, on the right. Auto, off and defrost are pretty clear. But what happened to the park (P) button? Can you find it? All too often I can’t. Perhaps the designer was a fan of Where’s Waldo. Or maybe the designer overlooked the fact that people who use reading glasses don’t wear them while driving.

Toyota did something similar with two of the buttons on the steering wheel, choosing a barely visible rendering of two icons. Compare these icons with the clearly visible return arrow above them. The design, as Michael Bierut would have put it, is simply dysfunctional.

What are my hopes? They are modest. I hope that college courses on graphic and industrial design promptly add a section on designing writing and icons so they are easily readable. I hope that web and product designers will elevate functionality to the same level as design aesthetics. I hope that we’ll witness the disappearance of webpage sign-ins that are challenging to decipher and the retiring of ghost print. I hope that future product manuals are written in clear, distinct and reasonably sized fonts. And I hope that Verizon gets its act together and removes that non-functioning sign-in page.