1- The forgotten password
We all forget passwords. So you click on that link on the login form, and you’re greeted with a blank text field for your email address.
And it’s usually blank, even if you already entered an email on the login page. How stupid is that?
2 - Is that VISA or MasterCard?
It happens every time I have to give my card information over the phone. On nearly every website with a checkout form, you usually have a drop-down.
That’s stupid, because if you have a credit card number, you already know who issued it. Wikipedia has a list of credit card prefixes. Mastercard starts with 51-55, VISA with 4.
3 - 90210, that’s in New York, right?
A simple search will tell you that’s Beverly Hills, CA. This one’s not nearly as trivial as my first two points to implement. Still, asking someone someone to input city, postal code and state is annoying, pointless and adds the possibility of error.
4 - English or Français on splash pages
Our browsers already tell servers what language they want pages served in. We have cookies to track these types of preferences. Yet the Canadian government still insists that every time I go to a department web site, I’m asked: Français / English?
Taking their cue from government, businesses do the same thing, which leads me to my last pet peeve.
5 - ATMs suck
Besides their outrageous fees, every time I visit another bank’s ATM, they ask me the language question. And then they ask me what operation I want to do, with only ONE choice: Withdrawal.
Pretty stupid, no? But my bank tops that. No language choice - but it asks me which account I want to withdraw money from. Even though I only have one chequing account with them.
There are a lot of small details that can add up to a pleasant, friction-less experience. Most of them don’t take that much effort. I believe it’s a responsibility on our part to create interfaces that are as simple as possible, so that people feel empowered.
Anyone have other examples they can share?
4 comments ↓
Login screens that put the “Forgot password” link as the next item in the tab order after the password but before the “Login” button.
I type my login, press Tab, type password, press tab and I should be able to either press enter or space and effectively submit. So often, I end up in the forgot password page.
Here’s a pet peeve of the low-tech kind. IVR systems that ask you a bunch of questions, only to have a live person ask you the same set of questions when they finally get on the line.
There’s a good reason web sites ask for full addresses, including zip code: reducing error. If the user inputs an impossible city/state/zip combination by mistake, the app can notice the error and suggest a possible combination. UPS does this, AOL does not (in 2004, anyway). Errors in typing zip codes are not uncommon, so it is very useful to have a way of checking for these mistakes, which is the purpose that requiring city and state serves. I got this from 37signals’ Defensive Design for the Web book.
You might imagine that there’s a similar justification for requiring users to say Visa or Mastercard, but credit card numbers already include a check digit, so no other information is necessary to check if the user has made a mistake.
James - I’ve never seen programmers check to see that the zip/ postal code was consistent with the state/province and city. That might be as much work as simply displaying the city once a user types in their code - in which case they’d notice right away if it was wrong.
Leave a Comment