So this might be treading on Usability Fail’s turf a bit, but I felt it needs to be posted anyway. (Sorry Lee, you’re just going to have to deal with it!) Anyway, I had to fill out a web form to have my W-2 from my summer at Harvard re-sent to my address in Michigan (since W-2s generally aren’t of much use sitting unopened in a mailbox in Massachusetts). The form isn’t much of a problem to fill out, so I take care of it quickly.
And then I see this:
Wait, what?
Okay, so let’s ignore the minor usability problems for a second, such as the red borders on the text inputs that scream “invalid”, the placement of the text explaining which fields are required after you’ve already filled out the form, and that big brown rectangle that’s actually a textfield, not to mention those awful indented buttons. What we have here is a monumental failure to sanity-check your error correction against real-world data. Yes, in case you haven’t guessed, this form will not accept the city “Ann Arbor” because it has a space in it.
Now, I know for a fact that computers have no problem whatsoever in storing data with a space in it. (Heck, my full name has a space in it, and this form clearly accepted that.) This can only mean that someone, probably a well-meaning but poorly-informed programmer, made an explicit and intentional choice to deny city names with spaces. Really, couldn’t you think of a single example of a city name that legitimately has a space in it? You didn’t think of New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Antonio, or Kansas City – not even my hometown of North Plainfield, New Jersey?
I understand that this form is obscure enough that it wasn’t worth running a full-scale usability evaluation on it, and I could understand if this came up on the web form of a business too small to afford usability testing. But I expect better from Harvard, one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
So, to finish this story, I took out the space and submitted the city name as AnnArbor. (I think CamelCasing your city’s name should be the first step towards establishing the city as a hub for new technology – are you listening, SanFrancisco, SanJose and RaleighDurham?) And sure enough, here’s what came the other day:
Ahhhhh, that’s great. I kind of wish the post office would’ve refused to deliver it for extra hilarity value, but unfortunately, they do have a sanity check mechanism – the zip code. On that note, I love forms that auto-fill-in your city based on your zip code. Genius!
Those forms that auto-fill your city name based on your zip are really handy, but you have to be careful because there’s not always a one-to-one correspondence. Just as an example, my New Jersey zip code (07063) covers both my town of North Plainfield and part of the neighboring town of Plainfield.
Oh, and I object to your wishing that they would’ve refused to deliver it. Tax season is enough of a hassle as is without the postal service acting up.
Hilarious!
By the way, I think that even if you put 07060, it would probably still get to your NJ address.