The standard user

I once sat beside a friend as her screen reader worked through her bank's online form.

Halfway through, it signed her out — a glitch, nothing dramatic. She signed back in. Her draft was saved; the system had done its part.

Finding it took twenty minutes. The draft sat on a cluttered account page with no heading and no landmark — nothing her screen reader could jump to. Eventually she found a draft number with a word search. She couldn't tell if it was today's or an old one. She never finished the form. She called the bank instead.

The form had saved her work. It just hadn't imagined her.

Every service builds in a standard user — my composite, stitched across the four cases below: one person, acting alone, who can see the screen and whose name fits the box. People who don't match rarely get a refusal. They get a shape they can't fit — the screen-reader user with no landmark, the attorney with no channel, the name that doesn't fit the field, the carer who isn't on the file. Nobody writes the standard user down. You can read it off the people it leaves out.

Her story ends in a phone queue. So do the attorneys'. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority reviewed how banks treat bereaved families and people acting under power of attorney. Most firms, it found, offered attorneys only a limited range of channels. In the regulator's own words: "app-based banking or online banking were often not available for the attorney to use. This limitation often appeared to be due to the firm's investment decisions, suggesting access could be expanded if resource was committed to it."

The account was modeled as one person acting alone. The attorney — a lawful second person — wasn't refused after consideration. She was never in the model. When the digital channel has no shape for you, the fallback is the assisted one: queues, callbacks, and cases the FCA found "lost" in the firm's systems.

Sometimes the shape is smaller than a channel. It's a box on a form. Indonesia wrote its standard name into law: at least two words, Latin letters, sixty characters maximum — in a country famous for one-word names. Jakarta later called the two-word rule advisory; local offices still treat it as the expectation. Underneath sits the planetary version: every passport on earth cuts its holder's name to fit the machine-readable zone — 39 characters of a 37-symbol alphabet, transliterated and truncated where it overflows, under ICAO's Doc 9303. The system works because it cuts. The cutting is written into the standard.

And sometimes the person doing the work isn't on the file at all. Patient portals model exactly one user: the patient. At Geisinger, which had offered shared access since 2003, four in a thousand portal users had anyone sharing access — while care partners did more than 95% of the work on the portal. A 2020 survey of 102 US hospitals found nearly half supported or recommended the workaround: share the patient's password. Only about one in five hospitals offering proxy accounts let the patient control what the proxy could see. The work is done by carers. The file credits the patient.

The French sociologist Madeleine Akrich gave this a name in 1992: designers inscribe a predicted user into the technical object — "like a film script, technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act." She called the result a script. And she noticed the script is easiest to see where it fails — at the people it leaves out.

That's an audit method hiding inside the theory, and it's the one I'd hand you: don't ask who the service is for — the brochure will lie. Ask who it excludes, and read the standard user off them in the negative.

My friend's bank never decided screen-reader users don't bank. It built "resume your draft" for someone who can scan a page with their eyes, and tested it with people who could. The standard user of that form had eyes. Nobody chose that on purpose. The budget chose it for them.

The objection is real: the caution is priced against real harm. In a single year, England, Wales and Northern Ireland recorded 764 reported cases of power-of-attorney misuse, £34.6 million in reported losses. Some attorneys steal. So the target was never "remove the friction." It's the missing middle: granular, auditable, revocable access for the second person. Almost nobody builds it. And it's genuinely hard to build: you have to identity-proof a second person, handle revocation when relationships sour, and carry the liability when the bank gets it wrong.

And it's genuinely hard to build: you have to identity-proof a second person, handle revocation when relationships sour, and carry the liability when the bank gets it wrong. The few who ship it scope it ruthlessly — Barclays' authorised-user cards with per-transaction limits, Santander's Carers Card capped at £1,500. The missing middle isn't a missing feature; it's a missing assurance model.

And the practitioner move comes from Microsoft's inclusive design work: exclusion is a mismatch between a person and a design, not a property of the person. Try it on the account in this issue — borrowed from ability, bent toward roles: the attorney, permanent; the partner covering the bills during a hospital stay, temporary; the adult child sorting a parent's paperwork from another city, situational. The "edge case" is usually the mass market with time added.

Designing for the assumed-competent user was never the defect. Leaving that assumption unexamined is — and shipping no way out for everyone who doesn't match.

Tell me one place your own service leaves someone out: the field, the channel, the missing role. One line is plenty. I read every reply.

Next week: Sunset. The feature nobody uses and nobody can kill, the shutdown notice nobody reads, the off switch nobody designed.

Forwarded this? The Listening Loop pulls apart one invisible piece of service design every Wednesday — subscribe and the next one lands in your inbox. See you then.

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