And this is Form usability, written Feb 07, 2007, and concerning Rants, Web, and Usability

Just a rant. I'm filling in a form for travel insurance through the Post Office, and I've just got to the "sign up for an account" bit. And that form annoys the hell out of me. Post Office flawed login form

First: you're the bloody Post Office! You make tons of money selling postcode data to all and sundry! Make it so I can just type in my postcode and it looks up my address! Fergawdsake, if they're not using it themselves, why would I want to licence it? Second, I bet that damned nearly all their customers are UK people. So why not preselect "United Kingdom" in the dropdown? And on that subject, why have that dropdown in the first place? I'm sure someone, once, at some dim point in the past, grabbed a list of all the countries they could find and stuck it in a <select> element, and since then people have just copied it. Round and round the web. Why do you care if they're in Anguila or Aruba? Does anyone ever actually report on this? Especially since they're not passing back an ID, which means this isn't a database lookup; it's passing back the name. Especially since most people for this site will be in the UK; why not just let non-UK types type in the name of their country? Who cares if they spell it wrong? I'll bet there are ambiguous countries on that list, and countries that no longer exist, and there are countries that do exist that aren't on it. Stop copying this huge country list into your websites! Especially since, according to their terms and conditions, "the products and services featured on this website are only available within the United Kingdom, or in relation to postings from the United Kingdom". Thirdly, I was really, sorely tempted, when I saw the "I would like to be known as" box, to enter "Grandmaster Ramrod". Is any of this ever going to get any better?

Comments

Tom

I hate the ones that don't have United Kingdom as the default, but try to be helpful by putting it first on the list. Meanwhile, I'm scrolling somewhere near the United Arab Emirates trying to work out if this is the one website that agrees with the Library of Congress that we should really be Great Britain.

http://aquarionical.livejournal.com/

Or, you could use GeoIP to preselect the country the person is in from the list, which is what my secret new thing does.

fizz

Have you checked if the post office is the cheapest? They were quite pricey for us...

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1083570446,24889,

sil

I like the idea of using GeoIP to enter a value into the text box and then allowing people to overtype it. I don't get why you need the big list, to be honest; big lists are useful if and only if you really need to know the exact value and people must not get it wrong, and to be honest I don't believe either of those things apply in most cases where the big country list is used.

sil

fizz: I checked them and a couple of others, and they were cheapest, but it was all much of a muchness (somewhere around the hundred pound mark for a year's insurance including trips to the US). So I went with the post office because, well, I like the post office :)

bruce

See my rant on how to find out a formfiller's country in a civilised manner

http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/index.php/2006/forms-inputting-country-names/

Dan Eastwell

Splendid! Nothing I like more than reading a heartfelt rant, made my morning. I do have to agree about the Country finder.

Although, would people be offended if you get to choose from seven or eight 'well-known' countries and you find your country isn't present? I suppose not as much as having to choose from 120-odd and your country isn't there without an option to add it...

Devon Young

I find it funny how so many of the most professional, most established, or most powerful companies/institutions can't seem to make a decently usable website.

http://drewp.pip.verisignlabs.com/

I am disappointed with this rant. Why does it stop so suddenly? :)

'Please complete all the items marked with an asterisk*' ?! How did the original meaning of asterisks on forms get taken over to mean "required"? Why not say "required" on those entries? The asterisk instructions are then overridden with more instructions midway down the form. You didn't paste this part, but the asterisks go crazy in the lower sections of the form. At least in my firefox, I'm seeing fields with repeated labels and asterisks after each.

I'm not from UK, so I don't know if the intended audience knows what 'house name' is. For all the fields with even slighly-obscure syntaxes, how about a sample off to the side? Less-experienced users can get pretty nervous when asked to enter a phone number into a blank space. At least in the US, we have no standard phone number format. It's not enough that the server would -accept- any format; the user should feel confident about what she is typing in.

Date of birth- clunky. If a list of 100+ drop-down numbers was cool, why not use it for the parts of the phone number too? I'm kidding!

T&C and privacy policy are spaced apart and presented differently. Doesn't T&C include PP?

There are about 30 things to fill in, but this layout as-is has no chance of fitting on anyone's screen. Loose layout is fine and whitespace is nice, but wouldn't the user's experience be better if she could see the progress she was making on this long form? Multiple columns, multiple pages, and above all fewer entries (e.g. city and postcode are redundant) could help.

'work phone number' is apparently not required. Why should anyone fill it in? If there's a reason the number would help, the form should tell you what that reason is.

David Soussan

Love to hate the Post Office as well.

They've not even provided enough lines for many full UK postal addresses: and believe me they will fail to deliver without a full address these days. So they must be going to relie on post code and street number.

I'm just surprised that they pre-select UK and not USA like so many forms: which usually also have redundant fields for 'State' (2 digit) and zip code that won't accept a UK post code even after you've selected UK, or presumably France, Spain, etc.

My pet peeve is that they and the postal authorities in other countries have NOT compiled XML Schema Definitions (XSD) for their postal address format that we could all then use to generate valid forms once a country has been selected. (It might then influence all the dumb-asses to create enough fields in their dbs to hold a proper address in the first place.) I used to live in hope that UN/CEFACT would take as lead in this, as they did on EDIFACT in the 70's, but no such luck.

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