web designers (or more generally programmers that design Graphical User interface) … where are those guys trained? sometimes the behaviour of web pages are simply crazy: I am wondering if they ever “think” about possible uses of their own product.
At the beggining of the web it was downright impossible to buy something from the Us if you came from another country: the page kept asking for a “state” (it means a US state) even if you came from another country 
now this does not happen often (though it happened to me recently), but beware if your nationality is “apatrid born in the gaza strip under egyptian administration” you will never be able to fill some forms!
In a previous job every year I was summoned to update my résumé on the web… except that it was impossible because I was born before 1950 and that was not supposed to happen in the web designer’s mind!
Now I discover a recurring snag: want to buy something in the US , pay from an address in France and have the good delivered in the US … apparently this is simply not supposed to happen!
I regularly write to the culprits but many (but not all) just pretend their site is ok …
any other remark from other grumpy users like me?
Ever tried to order something from Gamestop? Their form doesn’t allow me to input the correct credit card information.
It’s not necessarily bad user interface design, it could also be bad software design in general or it could also be possible that what you want to do is not a standard process for them and it would cost them a lot more to implement this feature than it would give in return.
This is true. I’m not a web designer by trade, but I learned how to do html/css in school, and help my mum out with her website. Of course, lots of useless school projects needed websites too. The most important factor is ease of use.
Don’t forget that these programmers are sometimes asked to do what they did. I really hate “mystery meat” websites, where you don’t know what the link is, until you hover over it. Also, fancy flash based websites. 
true and not true …
I have been a programmer in a financial house and when I was requested to do things that seemed crazy I rang a bell.
sometimes it’s the programmer himself that takes strange initiatives because he/she wants to “overdo” it by controling things that should not be controled … some example are famous in the programming community (the guy who controled that all names were containing only simple ascii characters so with name that contained ö or ç it could not work -this was in Europe an nothing could work!-)
some “security” guys are also overdoing it: there is a canadian company that pretends to act like PayPal but If you are traveling you cannot use your credit card because the security says “your IP address does not match the country where your credit card is registered”! clever! 
the problem with forms is that sometimes (often!) they cannot pretend to cover all possible cases: if it’s a paper form you can explain what is happening and the human being reading that can understand but you cannot argue with a stubborn computer!
I disagree with the previous comment that the effort to do things correctly may not be worth the hassle: 90% of the time this is an excuse for sloppy design…
If you talk about correctness in terms of having bug-free software then I agree with you disagreeing with me 
Sure it could be sloppy design but as long as you don’t know their business processes you will never really now.
I think the Pareto principle (or 80-20 rule) comes into play here which says that 80% of the specifications can be achieved in 20% of the time and the other way round. According to my experiences this is quite true especially in software development.
But I totally agree with you that not being allowed to be born before 1950 is… strange (just like being able to enter alphabetical characters into numerical input boxes) 
Though of course there’s always the issue of what happens if you don’t control what you allow the user to enter:
but I agree with this principle … but
wait a minute: either they allow a customer being from a foreign country or they don’t. If they don’t want it they just say have to say it, but if everything goes astray because this case crashes the software then they are at fault. If, as a programmer, good use of invested money told me not to implement some business cases then I programmed them out of bounds! the fact is that they didn’t even know about their own business process:( (everytime I review code this is the case: they did’nt even think of what they want! the programmer is told to check everything and so does he but in fact there are “holes” in the specs and in the controls… so clients get nervous and go for the competition; as a client myself I get irritated and stupidly vent my frustration on a forum :D)
BTW the “stupid” qualifier does not apply on those who write buggy code (I am fully qualified on this behalf!) but on those who denies bugs…
Totally agree
Don’t get me started…
I used to design/build Web stuff for a living. I was somewhere in the middle. I worked with programmers, designers, managers, marketing people, technical writers, etc. All the bits and pieces. Most of what you refer to was not in my hands; it required the programmers, managers, marketing people and writers to collaborate.
Problem is, they don’t all speak the same language. So they end up communicating to each other in a sort of pidgin English, conveying thoughts inadequately. There are many jokes about the disconnect between technical people and marketing people. Lots and lots. So the managers/marketing people don’t know how to properly frame the questions, and the programmers don’t know how to explain what they’re doing or what they need. Add in the fact that neither side of that conversation has the first clue about interface design or ease-of-use. In fact, one of the worst things you can do is put a “good” programmer in charge of building anything that “regular” people are supposed to use.
When it’s done right, you have people in between those two camps, who use a process to document everything and make sure it all makes sense before going into production. My company kind of specialized in that. Though we worked with tech companies (mostly Intel), the people we interfaced with were mostly marketing people. Anyway, we had the people who could understand the various sides of the problem, and would develop a Project Plan. A saying around our office was “No project plan? No project.” A hassle, perhaps, but it ends up saving tons of time and money.
So with a project plan (or similar) you have something that hopefully connects all the puzzle pieces to create a “good” design and interface. Though things may deteriorate from there, if you keep the plan updated it should continue to hold up.
But nobody’s perfect.
Things have gotten better over the years, but as a Mac user I am still occasionally faced with crap websites that were built for Microsoft Internet Explorer, by someone who assumes all the important people in the world use that as their default browser because it’s built into the operating system. It still amazes some of these people when they find out the last version of IE for the Mac was from 2001. And it was crap then. Again, the “good” web builders would build their sites to the standards, then tweak them to work with the individual browser products. Building it for IE and then trying to “fix” it from there can be very problematic, but there’s still a lot of it going on.
While we’re ranting, can I toss out a complaint to all the voiceover readers, announcers, newscasters and everyone else who utters the word “backslash” when giving out a URL on TV or radio? Sure, some of them are just doing their job (reading the copy as written) but can’t we do some virtual slaps on the wrist to get the word out that there aren’t any backslashes? {Only place I’ve seen them is in Microsoft products or Windows-based Intranet sites – yes, I’ll blame Microsoft for that too} This probably won’t happen if we can’t even get people to learn where NOT to put an apostrophe. Not on all those “esse’s”, if you know what I mean.
The first rule to be thrown out the window by designers/programmers/builders who want to either do something “cool” or something “cutting-edge”.
Yes, and even worse, the ones where you can’t even tell what’s a link until you hover over it. Like a lot of fancy Flash-based sites. I’ll offer another good rule of thumb for Web design: Do you want people to learn a new user interface, or learn about/buy your product? 
What gets me is when I go to buy something, scroll down to CANADA from the country list, the page refreshes and I scroll down to Saskatchewan in the province/territory list then can only put in 5 characters, or only numbers in the postal code section.
We have 6 character postal codes alternating between letters and numbers. A1A-1A1. You would think if they went through all the effort to figure out how to spell Saskatchewan and Nunavut to put in a drop menu, they would look up how many digits to allow for out postal codes.
Not a gripe at any website in particular, but country-specific content, if it is of interest to people worldwide.
I mean, I understand if this is TRH14 (Guidelines on Road Construction Materials), as issued by the Dept of Roads here in .za, or something equally technical, but when it is a radio program? Put it behind a paywall, if you must, but at least do not make me jump through hoops just to listen to it. (Arguably paying is a hoop, but at least I am not going to need to set up any proxies just to hear. Or I had better not…)
On a related note: so many sites assume that I have a Paypal account. Paypal works, but is a hassle, here in South Africa. As far as I recall, you can only use money paid to it to make purchases, there is no way to withdraw it. It is a global world now, make a plan.
Thank you. The main reason for this is that few good programmers really like building things for regular users. Most good programmers are more interested in other problems. Trying to get a good programmer to work on something they don’t enjoy working on is doomed to failure; they often stop being a good programmer as apathy sets in, soon followed by a letter of resignation.
Obviously, I’ve seen the USA designed sites that only allow US formatted postcodes too. Or the ones that have dropdown boxes for your USA state, even after you’ve selected a country other than the USA. As a person living in a GMT+0930 timezone, it often irks me when I’m only given the option of GMT+0900 or GMT+1000 (I’m looking at you, router in the corner).
That same problem is even at ExpertSexchange.com -oups- ExpertsExchange.com