So I was looking for a good price on a little Honda I’m interested in. I stumbled across a site that pings all the dealers in my vicinity for their best price.
One thing I do when I’m not sure of how trustworthy a site is…is use my initials instead of my first name. And usually I accompany it with “plus” addressing, which is simply a way to identify if an organization is selling your email address to third parties. You put “pjsherman+[something else]@gmail.com”, and Gmail will still deliver it to your base address. If you start receiving spam at that address, then you know that the company sold your address. And, you can easily block it.
So I fill out the form, and enter “PJ” – short for Paul Joseph – into the first name field.
And the form barfs. Plus, it gets all scoldy with its CAPITALIZATION of CONTACT and VALID. In my head it sounds like a smarmy schoolteacher.
Then I got curious and entered in some variations to see if the form would accept certain two-letter first names.
Nope.
So the upshot is…if you’re Bo or Al or Ty or Jo, this company isn’t interested in your business.
Not parsing phone numbers into area code-exchange-suffix is just plain lazy coding. It makes for hard-to-read numbers.
’nuff said.
OK, I didn’t say enough. This is yet more evidence that the price of usability is eternal vigilance.
Stepping off the soapbox now. Have a good day y’all.
(Note: It must be “beat up on Amazon day” here in Central Texas, because I just noticed that Russell Wilson over at Dexo Design just posted an article about Amazon’s “can’t sign in from home page” problem.)
After all these years, Amazon still hasn’t fixed that wonky “new customer” / “returning customer” interaction.
For those of us who tab their way through form fields, this one bites me in the butt every time. First I enter my email, then I tab to the password field. Then I enter it, tab to the commit button, and get whacked by the “Oops! You forgot to say you’re a returning customer!” gotcha.
Now I love Amazon like crazy, but this one is such an EASY fix. Why is it still around after all these years?
Found at the Lowe’s off of Anderson Lane in North Austin.
I asked the cashier how often she has to help customers who pay with a debit or credit card, and she replied that before the design modification she had to help customers more than 75% of the time.
After one of the cashiers made these after-the-fact design mods, cashiers rarely have to assist customers.
