Not Everyone is an Insider

This post is about me observing me interacting with a secure website for a few big organizations and realizing some of the mistakes I made and some mistakes I could not prevent when Access Rio was being built.  In order to protect my online privacy I will not share the name of the organizations that I am talking about.  This happened to me with two organizations in two different industries and the good website is yet in another industry.
I had to get an appointment with a person in one of these organizations. However, I could not accomplish the task. I went to the physical location where the appointment would take place and was told to go onto the website. I explained that I could not figure out their log in procedures. They made me wait till someone came and walked me through the process.
Being an old man, I forgot the process as soon as I got home. The next day I tried to log in and I could not. I called the 1800 number and got some lady somewhere in the Midwest to send me my password via old fashioned mail.
Three days later with my username and password in hand I logged in and realized that I could not figure out the set up of the site. I started doing what I always do clicking at random on various links to figure out the site.
As I was doing this I quickly realized that the site was set up more for the convenience of the people who work there rather for their clients.  This criticism is not completely fair since they are trying to deal with rules set up by another bureaucracy and want to protect my information.
So what is my complaint?

• I have used secure websites for other organizations that deal with my private information. However, once inside their website is very intuitive to navigate.  

• Better sites are intuitive to navigate because they are well organized
• Better sites lack clutter (I do not suffer from having too many choices).
• If a choice is offered, it is very clear and I do not have to guess which option to choose within the option.

•  The attitude of the people working at the physical location was upsetting too.
•  I got the feeling that I am not smart enough because I cannot figure out their stupid website.

So what did I miss when we were building Access Rio?

• I assumed that since the Millennial generation are internet natives they will figure it out.  Well I am online all of the times and I could figure out the thinking of these two websites.

What am I guilty of partialy when building Access Rio?

• Some of the clutter on the Access Rio page is due to me!

I am guilty of pushing for this!

To be fair to myself I fought to keep some of the other clutter out of the page with some (not complete) success.

Who else is guilty of  which sin I will not say but I do believe we need to keep our physical presence and remind both faculty and staff that not everyone is an insider. Some of our students are just passing through and do not want to learn our Byzantine ways!
 If some new Byzantine rule such as deadlines or a new procedure is forced upon us by some other bureaucracy (such as the State or the Dept of Education) we should have that displayed in bold letters somewhere on the Access Rio website.  Actually we do have a place for that but we should consider moving the announcement section to the top and the  middle of the first page and make it bigger.

We should move this to make it more visible!!