ireland, like finland and a lot of other european countries, has a tv licence. in ireland its about 150€ per year per household. the money primarily goes to fund the public broadcasting services (in ireland its rté, in the uk its the bbc and in finland its yle).

anyway, introductions over, i was visting the news part of the rté website today, catching up on all the goings on. when i saw a link to more info about the tv licence, so i clicked on it. i was taken to a page that had some forms that you could download and print off and then use to apply for the licence. “handy” i thought, then i looked at the forms. the forms were put together by an post (irelands postal company) a company not renowned for their use of design forethought in the layout of forms.

on the page there was images of two of the forms, one was a bank account direct debit form and the other a credit card form. below is a partial screenshot of two areas of the forms, on the left the bank debit and on the right the credit card form.

there are a few things that are incredibly strange about these two forms. firstly, on the left hand side there is space for one to enter in their bank account details, but why the irregularly sized boxes? numbers dont change in size why should the boxes?. secondly, on the right hand form, the image on the site is a screenshot, complete with all the ms word spelling mistakes: it underlines amost every single irish word in red as they arent in its dictionary and it thinks “authorise” is spelt incorrectly. so this persons computer is set to american english and doesnt have irish dictionary installed. the screenshot doesnt affect the final form of course, but it just shows that the forms are (presumably) often just produced by a person on their own with not a huge level of thought put into the usability of the forms. another semi pointless ramble there. good work.