90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

I just tried to fill in an online form and I typed in my details (actually I pressed a little button on the Google toolbar that filled most of it in for me. Marvellous…) then submit.

The form popped up a warning dialog telling me to fix my postcode. It then highlighted the postcode field and in red letters next to it was the phrase ‘Spaces are not allowed’.

I did wonder whether it would have been less effort for the programmer to simply remove the spaces for me then to go to all that trouble… I can’t think of any technical reason why it wouldn’t be easier to strip the spaces from the postcode field than it is to go through all that validation and error message business.

Andy Budd (the other slightly better known AndyB – he scolded me once on a mailing list for signing myself AndyB. Cheek!) demolishes thetrainline.com rather nicely.

I wonder if companies get to read this kind of stuff and whether they take it seriously? Andy has provided free gold-dust here and they should be sitting around a laptop in their boardroom frowning and holding their collective chins.

Not every critique is of this calibre and not every criticism is valid. Casual users often don’t understand the constraints that force you to implement things a certain way. But in it is amazing how many products get out the door containing howlers. If you were too cheap to do a usability study in the first place then google for yourself occasionally and you might get some valuable free advice!

Read every email that contains complaints and suggestions and repond humbly to them all – even if you disagree. And check your server logs to see if lots of people end up departing your site at the same place.

(Almost forgot. He just wrote an update to the original post which is what reminded me about it in the first place)