I complained about one pet peeve on Monday (stock certificates for startups) and can’t help myself with another one today: programs that complain about user inputs that are easily fixable.  Yesterday I copied a bunch of email addresses from Jobscore and pasted them into the bcc field of an email in Outlook.  The emails were comma separated.  Outlook didn’t like that – and popped up a dialog saying something was wrong, including suggesting that I replace commas with semicolons.  I copied the emails into TextEdit and did a find and replace, but only after first tweeting that I really would expect Outlook to do this for me. 

This is just one example of a whole class of problems in which developers did not take the time to make a form accept a likely range of inputs, but instead insist on a specific format.  Phone number input fields that don’t allow dashes or dots in the numbers are a perfect example.  It is trivial to allow these and discard them after the fact.  Another one is that almost all payment input forms ask users about the type of credit card.  That is of course completely redundant information because the first four digits of the card number encode that information!

While I am at complaining about user interface annoyances here is another one: browsers not letting you tab into a list box.  When filling out a form, I really like not having to move the mouse pointer and just use the keyboard instead.  But Firefox and Safari both tend to skip over lists instead of popping them open and letting me use the keyboard to move to the right entry.

I complained about one pet peeve on Monday (stock certificates for startups) and can’t help myself with another one today: programs that complain about user inputs that are easily fixable.  Yesterday I copied a bunch of email addresses from Jobscore and pasted them into the bcc field of an email in Outlook.  The emails were comma separated.  Outlook didn’t like that – and popped up a dialog saying something was wrong, including suggesting that I replace commas with semicolons.  I copied the emails into TextEdit and did a find and replace, but only after first tweeting that I really would expect Outlook to do this for me. 

This is just one example of a whole class of problems in which developers did not take the time to make a form accept a likely range of inputs, but instead insist on a specific format.  Phone number input fields that don’t allow dashes or dots in the numbers are a perfect example.  It is trivial to allow these and discard them after the fact.  Another one is that almost all payment input forms ask users about the type of credit card.  That is of course completely redundant information because the first four digits of the card number encode that information!

While I am at complaining about user interface annoyances here is another one: browsers not letting you tab into a list box.  When filling out a form, I really like not having to move the mouse pointer and just use the keyboard instead.  But Firefox and Safari both tend to skip over lists instead of popping them open and letting me use the keyboard to move to the right entry.