Keep It Simple Silly

I had a “mad as hell moment” that made me want to set up this website.

If you understand the “mad as hell” reference you are old enough, and hopefully picky enough to get something out of this site. Younger people are usually too accepting of the internet’s shortcomings, I suppose they’ve been brought up on it so have no basis of comparison with systems that work more reliably and less confusingly.

Yes I was mad about the complexity of the internet world – why is doing things on it so needlessly complex and unhelpful?

I had just turned 60, and was welcomed into the seniors world: “have a look at the seniors’ website!” I was invited, “there are 2,000 discount offers to be had there!” “Wow!” I thought, “this should be interesting” – in fact there are now 3,666   offers …HOWEVER!

https://www.seniorsonline.vic.gov.au/seniors-card/discount-directory

There is no index of offers. Well there is, carefully hidden under “advanced”, so you have to know how to access that subheading. How many of us are going to find it, and WHY SHOULD WE HAVE TO BUGGERISE AROUND FOR WHAT SEEMS LIKE HOURS ON THE SITE TO UNCOVER IT? (It’s not a very detailed index of offers either.)

Instead this is what I did, and is no doubt similar to what most people do:

I put in “look at all discounts” and to narrow down the 3.666 offers I gave my location to the computer. It produced a random list of 1,628 results

The first page offered me Handcrafts, Antenna Installations and Pyrography (whatever that is)

Am I going to scroll through 163 pages so I can see all the discounts being offered? And go to places like EUMEMMERRING because that shows up as apparently “local to me”

So the point is, this site is telling me that I have to know what discounts I am looking for, otherwise I can’t input the keywords that will help me find them. I don’t know what I want,

I just wanted to see what was available…!

And what about the poor discount-offering business which through no fault of its own is listed on page 87? Who will ever see them? Who will ever get to that business by browsing through the whole list??? With a better indexing system they can be seen by the appropriate customers.

If I were shown a comprehensive index listed by discount type right in front of me when I accessed this main discount page, I could narrow-down what I was immediately interested in…!

I might also find other interesting categories to browse.

Instead I did what most people do: I got confused and overwhelmed and clicked off the site.

So instead of just grouching about it, I decided in a small way to simplify the complex world of computers and internet, starting with this site as an example.

I may be singling this site out, but note that there are thousands of similar confusing sites in the world just like it or often far worse.

So if you click on this link here, you will get to a parallel page to the victorian seniors discount page, where I have set up an index that does the things we all want, “keeping it simple” as the site says.  I am adding the discount-offerers to it as I have time to contact them, and if they genuinely want to be found by their customers.

I am not getting anything financial out of this, I am just presenting the offers as they should be: by creating a well-structured location-index so you can see all the options in front of you at a glance, and a location guide you can understand quickly. I hope the real Seniors Discount Guide eventually adopts this approach, so I can then delete this parallel site.