Andy's Blog

Pardon me, but I'm having a proud moment. Just bought photoshop and put a few hours into playing around with it to generate that. Pretty neat huh?

I frequent several websites (Cingular for example) that have a feature in their data entry forms for phone numbers that automatically jumps out of the area code, into the "first three", and then finally into the "last four". So you just type:

   2346547890

and happily it fills out the form like

   234 654 7890

However, what these technical luminaries fail to realize is two things:

1. Not everyone can touch type numbers (much less touch type at all)
2. The vast marjority of the forms on the web that solicit phone numbers either don't break the field in three parts, or don't have the fancy "auto tabbing" feature.

The result of this miscalculation is a customer experience that leads to the form being filled out like this:

   234 ___ 654_

And if the final tab takes you into another field (say name). Your "name" happily starts out as "7890"

Frustrated the customer has a mess to cleanup, and if they're anything like me, they'll discover when "Helpful hurts" as they accidentally (despite now knowing) repeat the same mistake because the "tab" is in their fingers. This time slightly closer because they repositioned the cursor in the "first three" field so they have:

   234 654 ____

With name still starting as "7890". Maybe I'm abnormal because I use the web ALL THE TIME, but I bet not, and I'd bet larger money that Cingular (and others) haven't user-tested this feature.

I was doing a little clean-up of my e-mail inbox this morning. I had a folder structure that looked like this:

The Future/
   Business
   Personal

As I was surfing through it, I decided that it wasn't well organized, had irrelevant stuff in it, and basically needed an overhaul. So I moved Business up a level and gave it some sub-folders and moved the personal stuff around into existing folders. Finally I DELETED 'THE FUTURE', which gave me a chuckle.

What is God's UI to His creation? I don't know but I'm pretty certain that it can't be Outlook.