Ordinary Nothing

I was checking out some program, and in order to download it was required to fill a personal information form (Which I didn’t do, as the program didn’t seem to justify all the info they wanted, but that’s beside the point of this post).

The form contains all sorts of field, including the usual name ones, and so on. The first field was a drop-down list labelled “Title”, without a default value.

I tried to press the submit button anyway, to see if maybe the form is optional. It wasn’t, of course. But the error message I received indicated that I have to fill in the “Gender” field.

I scanned the form, and while there were many fields there, there wasn’t anyone labelled “Gender”. At all.

So I made the assumption the check is done by order. And decided to open the drop-down list of the “Title” field. True enough, there were only two options – “Mr” and “Mrs”. So this was their way of differentiating gender.

I guess it started as a proper gender field, done the usual way with the two normal options. And then some executive decided they need a title field, thinking about all those titles and honorific they’re missing out of because the field is empty (Some sites have scary title lists with dozens of items, making it really complex for the people who are both princes, judges, and doctors at the same time, for example).

Only it appears that after changing the field to “Title”, and making it so that it could contain more options, the oversight must have ended. And it got reassigned to the gender job by someone who failed to realize that not all males want to be called Mr., nor are (a much bigger problems) all females properly described as Mrs.

Combine that with the lack of synchronization between the person doing the change, and the person in charge of doing the validation code for correct data (or at least the one in charge of writing the error messages), and you get exactly what I saw. Not filling a title, and being told I have to fill in the gender.

Funny, but it does not inspire much confidence in the technical, or design, abilities of the site operators and the company behind it.

November 28th, 2005 at 15:31 EET | Categories: Marketing, Web | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.