I thought the SingTel free wireless login page was broken today. When I try to click on the password field to enter my password, the mouse pointer turned into an arrow and I got taken to a different page.

singtel-wireless-login-2.jpg

I was just about to give up when I realised that I had previously enlarged the text display on the browser. This has actually caused the link normally below the Password field to float above it, thereby obscuring the field. When I reduced the text size, I got the "correct" layout back.

singtel-wireless-login-1.jpg

This is yet another example of dumb unthinking design. There should be no reason for the designer to speficially prevent the page from accommodating text size changes. Given the current trend towards designing sites with tiny type, one would expect many users to scale up the text size on their browsers in order to be able to read anything.

Of course, there is really one reason to deliberately knobble usability - that being to make the design look exactly as it would on a piece of paper, where nothing changes.

Yet another example of an insufficiently-trained graphic designer working on a media format he/she does not really get.