Lara Swanson

And this is the story of how not snow, not power outage, not lack of warmth perturbed me… but National Grid’s incapability of providing information to mobile users drove me furious.

To set the scene: it’s Snowtober, and my husband and I are prepared. We set the thermostat to 78 degrees to start warming the house before the inevitable power outage. We huddle on the couch with our pets to watch a scary movie (it is Halloween weekend, after all!). And just before 10, our power goes out. No problem, we’re prepared: we grab our flashlights and a bunch of blankets and head upstairs to go to sleep.

The next morning, power is still out, much to our surprise. I get out the hand-crank USB charger and go to work on my phone to assess our surroundings. Who else in our town is without power? How are things where I go to work? What’s the emergency response like in our area? And is National Grid aware of our lack of power?

I head over to National Grid Massachusetts’ web site. Here’s what I see.

I’ve numbered the areas in the order that they draw my attention. Ooh, a big banner that says Outage Central! I can even check restoration times? Yippee! I start pounding my finger on the screen attempting to hit an area with a link to no avail. I zoom in and tap on each bullet point. Nothing. I click the very small “Learn More” footprint (troublesome for a mobile user) – bingo! But wait, what’s this? Learn More took me to a page on Storm Safety (note: this is not the same result if you click Learn More while on a desktop). There’s no outage information. Oookay, back button it is then.

I read the paragraph (#2 in the screenshot above) and there’s still no link to where I can find more information about what’s going on in my area. I scan around – oh look, another colorful banner in the sidebar! Why didn’t I see this before? Oh right, because my mobile screen is tiny, and the center banner had grabbed my attention first. Oh, and the sidebar is typically for auxiliary information and navigation, so why would I have thought to look there? Never matter, I click away! But what’s this – it’s one big banner? There’s still no way to get to each individual bullet point listed from that home page? It’s okay, at least I’m on the right track.

(Note – I never even noticed the link #4 on that home screen. It’s very small, easily scrolled by like when I clicked on the big banner. I only noticed it when I was on my desktop later.)

Alright, I’m finally in Outage Central. What do I see?

First, I try to zoom in on the map by clicking on my area. Whoa, I have no idea what I just did, but it definitely didn’t zoom in. Back to square one – let’s try the arrows near #2. OK, closer! But because of my small screen, I’m having a really hard time scrolling back and forth between the arrows, zooming in and out, and the actual geographic location where I live. I give up and move on to #3 – “More…”. I expect it to have a way to search by zip, type in my county or town name, or at least give some total numbers for each area. “More” typically means that you will get “More” of what’s above, or a different way to filter out the results that you’re looking at. Instead, “More” does… nothing. At least nothing that I can see on my screen. OK, I give up on that one.

Note here that on such a small screen, I didn’t even see the “Go To” widget below. But even after I checked this out on my desktop and tried it, it still didn’t give me any outage/restoration time information. Just an unhelpful icon that says “Multiple Outages”. What does that even mean? Is it less than “<5 Customers Out", the icon above it in the list of descending numbers of customers affected? How could you be "less than less than 5"? The icon indicates that there are multiple icons in one icon, but I have no idea what that would indicate, or how it's helpful to me right now.

I click on "Summary" near #4. I have no idea what I am about to see, but I figure it's going to at least point me in some new direction, since I've hit a dead end. Huzzah! This appears to be the information I'm looking for! I have no idea why it's a Summary, since I really need very detailed information about my town, but eh who cares. I'm close!

The Summary has popped up over the map on my screen. And I quickly notice that there's no scrollbar. Well, um, ok, let's at least click on my county...

GAH! My town’s off the screen! And there’s no way for me to get to it!

Are you kidding me, National Grid? This was the worst user experience in an already tough situation. I’m without power – I can’t use my desktop or laptop at home. I only have internet on my phone, and your site is completely unusable for the most important piece of information I’m looking for. You’ve forgotten about a really important audience, one who wants one particular piece of information, and you’ve hidden it from them. Please solve this before the next Snowpocalypse!