What struck me the most was how she gets her email. FIOS set her up with their webmail, so she clicks on the bookmark, it shows a progress bar for 5 seconds while i assume it's pulling your customer info. Once that clears they showed a full page interstitial about some verizon product and i think lacked any skip button.
Once that cleared they showed what amounted to an old school portal - about a third was verizon info/support/ok apps, but then the rest was filled with some crap news feed inserts a few product upsell teasers, and i think a third party ad or two.
Ok click on email, normal login page, open email app. So this thing has a Verizon top banner that's huge, like 25% or 30% of her screen that is framed and never scrolls off. It takes two clicks just to make it show her inbox instead of a blank content area.
The app wasn't terrible, just maybe circa 2002 or so with only a few of the controls disguising themselves as the background. Usable enough as long as you don't mind the actual mail/composer only getting about 25% of the screen real estate. The kicker was the timeout - "for her protection" it kills her idle session after somewhere around 10-20 minutes at which point it pops up a modal dialog about being logged out, then pops it up again after you hit ok. Then it's back to stage 1 (5 second progress bar) and the experience begins anew including the interstitial and submitting you email credentials again.
I know telcos do some of the worst software engineering on earth, but jesus. No wonder some people consider the web as shitty and just want to get whatever task they need to use it for over with.
And no, I didn't really do much to improve it aside from exiling the toolbars and some shittier than average bestbuy run at login crap ware. I feel shitty about not making it at least not terrible, but that's hours to set things up right + a few hours of instruction + then the support calls come :/ And then the neighbor she told the story to calls.
It sucks that things like geeksquad are so shitty and are prone to upselling crap and exploiting technophobes. And I assume the it pro flier sector is at least as bad on average. Because if you're a novice and don't have a relative that's ok you're basically stuck.
And yet I made her swear twice that she won't tell any of her friends that I helped her.
[1] Ok, yeah, I guess I got a bit off topic there. But fios portal webmail is shitty.