design failure

[cellio]

Dear First Data (online payment system):

If, on the first page of the transaction, you asked me for the credit-card type, and then on the second page you gave me a text-entry box for the card number that allowed enough characters for me to type the spaces between the groups of numbers on the card, do not get all snippy at me about "wrong format". First, you should have told me "no spaces" up front; second, you shouldn't have let me type more than 16 characters there for my Visa card. You had enough information to present a correct-for-my-card-type input box and remove all doubt. It's not 1995 any more; we have web technologies that can handle this. Actually, given your multi-page setup, we could totally have done that in 1995 too. I think I did, actually.

Also, after clicking the "pay" button I should not be presented with a blank page that takes nearly two minutes to show a receipt, leaving me wondering what happened. A simple "working, please wait" could do wonders.

I would be happy to refer you to someone who could fix your user-experience problems for a reasonable fee.

Comments

[talvinm.livejournal.com]

They don't know how to strip extra spaces out of received alphanumerics? I learned to do that in Multi-User Forth: a variety of Forth for MUCKs (a variety of MUD/MOO). FORTH. Not exactly a high-powered tool by today's standards.

This is first-year Computer Science stuff.

[cellio]

Yeah, post-processing the input for whitespace is totally "programming 101" stuff. But if for some reason post-processing it too burdensome for them, they had all the information available to avoid the problem in the first place.

[starmalachite.livejournal.com]

IME, about 9 out of 10 web forms that require a credit card # input *don't* tell you in advance what format. The default seems to be no dashes or spaces, but this is not absolute -- I've gotten snippy messages after the fact for doing that too.

In most cases, I'd prefer it as 1 long string, but in this instance I'd prefer visually breaking it up to make proofreading my entry easier. Too bad.

[cafemusique.livejournal.com]

I always found that to be frustrating on Canadian postal codes. Because a properly formatted Canadian postal code is similar to "A1B 2C3" and it became quite frustrating with those sites who wanted the postal code without spaces, but didn't tell you until after you didn't read their minds.

Phone numbers are another common spot for annoying user experience. I've come across at least one or two sites lately where the problem was that the EXAMPLE they provided did not match the format they wanted you to type. "Yes, programmer. Very nice. You figured out how to take a string of numbers and turn it into '(xxx) xxx-xxxx'. Next time, would you give your example as 1234567890, so that the site doesn't complain about me giving punctuation or complain that my response, with the same number of characters as your example, is too long!"