Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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malbui said:
Well, the CFO despises the CIO and wants him out.

The CIO wants to increase his empire even further.

The CEO wants it to look as though he’s got costs under control without actually having to get involved in any kind of management.

As the CAE I could end up shaping the future of the organisation without actually being allowed to take any decisions at the governance level.
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Which means no responsibility.....
 
Argh!!! What is with people not thinking about their damn inputs?! I just renewed my license plates online. It took a ridiculously long time because I had to enter information re: my personal property tax so the DMV form could query the tax database.

They gave me text boxes to input my city name. Not a dropdown, a text box.

Do you know how many fricking ways there are to say "St Louis"? A LOT. I had to try them ALL before I finally hit on the one that worked. I tried:

St Louis
St. Louis
ST LOUIS
ST. LOUIS
Saint Louis
SAINT LOUIS
St Louis City
St. Louis City
ST LOUIS CITY
ST. LOUIS CITY
Saint Louis City
SAINT LOUIS CITY

That last one turned out to be the "correct" one, i.e. the one that's recorded on a line in a database somewhere.

Then I had to enter my name in a text box, too. First Last? First Middle Initial Last? All Caps? Period after the middle initial or not? Again, the experiments. And it turned out to be Last, First Middle Initial.

ARGH!!!

Sometimes it's not the user, it's the damn application. The inputs could at least have been converted to all caps before the query ran, would have cut the possibilities in half right there. Or, I don't know, specify the format wanted? Thank God they didn't demand a date field as well.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Argh!!! What is with people not thinking about their damn inputs?! I just renewed my license plates online. It took a ridiculously long time because I had to enter information re: my personal property tax so the DMV form could query the tax database.

They gave me text boxes to input my city name. Not a dropdown, a text box.

Do you know how many fricking ways there are to say "St Louis"? A LOT. I had to try them ALL before I finally hit on the one that worked. I tried:

St Louis
St. Louis
ST LOUIS
ST. LOUIS
Saint Louis
SAINT LOUIS
St Louis City
St. Louis City
ST LOUIS CITY
ST. LOUIS CITY
Saint Louis City
SAINT LOUIS CITY

That last one turned out to be the "correct" one, i.e. the one that's recorded on a line in a database somewhere.

Then I had to enter my name in a text box, too. First Last? First Middle Initial Last? All Caps? Period after the middle initial or not? Again, the experiments. And it turned out to be Last, First Middle Initial.

ARGH!!!

Sometimes it's not the user, it's the damn application. The inputs could at least have been converted to all caps before the query ran, would have cut the possibilities in half right there. Or, I don't know, specify the format wanted? Thank God they didn't demand a date field as well.
Click to expand...

Why I love combo boxes and forced inputs. You type in what you want and you get the closest allowed input available. Sometimes I'll also put in an extra just text box on the side so you can put in whatever scrawl makes you comfortable but searching, sorting and classifying happen by the forced input.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Argh!!! What is with people not thinking about their damn inputs?! I just renewed my license plates online. It took a ridiculously long time because I had to enter information re: my personal property tax so the DMV form could query the tax database.

They gave me text boxes to input my city name. Not a dropdown, a text box.

Do you know how many fricking ways there are to say "St Louis"? A LOT. I had to try them ALL before I finally hit on the one that worked. I tried:

St Louis
St. Louis
ST LOUIS
ST. LOUIS
Saint Louis
SAINT LOUIS
St Louis City
St. Louis City
ST LOUIS CITY
ST. LOUIS CITY
Saint Louis City
SAINT LOUIS CITY

That last one turned out to be the "correct" one, i.e. the one that's recorded on a line in a database somewhere.

Then I had to enter my name in a text box, too. First Last? First Middle Initial Last? All Caps? Period after the middle initial or not? Again, the experiments. And it turned out to be Last, First Middle Initial.

ARGH!!!

Sometimes it's not the user, it's the damn application. The inputs could at least have been converted to all caps before the query ran, would have cut the possibilities in half right there. Or, I don't know, specify the format wanted? Thank God they didn't demand a date field as well.
Click to expand...

Here we go..


DD-MMM-YYYY
DD/MMM/YYYY
YYYY/DD/MM
YY-MM-DD
Stardate...
 
Norman Alexander said:
Here we go..


DD-MMM-YYYY
DD/MMM/YYYY
YYYY/DD/MM
YY-MM-DD
Stardate...
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Modern HTML has an input designed specifically for calendar dates: <input type="date">. Compliant browsers will show an input field. possibly with the year, month, and day ordered according to a user's locale, and usually with a pop-up calendar to assist with the input. Unfortunately older web sites will still use the older <input type="text">, and clueless designers will assume the atrocious US "mm/dd/yyyy" format (or even worse, "mm/dd/yy") without telling the user that. So for someone born on 1 December 2003 the input sequence can be difficult to figure out and the resulting text string can be parsed three different ways.

In my opinion, there is only one acceptable date format, ISO 8601: YYYY-MM-DD.
 
Blue Mountain said:
Modern HTML has an input designed specifically for calendar dates: <input type="date">. Compliant browsers will show an input field. possibly with the year, month, and day ordered according to a user's locale, and usually with a pop-up calendar to assist with the input. Unfortunately older web sites will still use the older <input type="text">, and clueless designers will assume the atrocious US "mm/dd/yyyy" format (or even worse, "mm/dd/yy") without telling the user that. So for someone born on 1 December 2003 the input sequence can be difficult to figure out and the resulting text string can be parsed three different ways.

In my opinion, there is only one acceptable date format, ISO 8601: YYYY-MM-DD.
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Are the dashes required in the input? :eek:
 
I date my food containers slated for the freezer in YYMMDD format. At least I know if anything starts with "20" or less I should really throw it out.
 
The Man said:
Why I love combo boxes and forced inputs. You type in what you want and you get the closest allowed input available. Sometimes I'll also put in an extra just text box on the side so you can put in whatever scrawl makes you comfortable but searching, sorting and classifying happen by the forced input.
Click to expand...

The first time I used one myself was some JS widget someone recommended. It was a damned big list of possible values and I was amazed how responsive it was. I go back to Netscape and pre-gopher days.

On the flip side my doctors surgery decided patient verification should be my name and date of birth. They used a widget designed for appointments etc so you had to click "<" to go back a month. My birthdate was over 60 years ago and I may be picky but over 700 clicks for a date seems like bad UX.
 
Wudang said:
On the flip side my doctors surgery decided patient verification should be my name and date of birth. They used a widget designed for appointments etc so you had to click "<" to go back a month. My birthdate was over 60 years ago and I may be picky but over 700 clicks for a date seems like bad UX.
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That's even worse than the depressing moment when you are confronted with a dropdown box of years in descending order and you have to scroll down to find your birth year. "Keep going. Nope, keep going. Damn, is it buffering now?!"
 
TragicMonkey said:
That's even worse than the depressing moment when you are confronted with a dropdown box of years in descending order and you have to scroll down to find your birth year. "Keep going. Nope, keep going. Damn, is it buffering now?!"
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On one occasion, a dropdown date I had to fill in for my birthday refused to go back more than 50 years. They must have had thousands of people born on 1-Jan-1970. I think that was a UNIX limitation...someone?
 
Wudang said:
The first time I used one myself was some JS widget someone recommended. It was a damned big list of possible values and I was amazed how responsive it was. I go back to Netscape and pre-gopher days.

On the flip side my doctors surgery decided patient verification should be my name and date of birth. They used a widget designed for appointments etc so you had to click "<" to go back a month. My birthdate was over 60 years ago and I may be picky but over 700 clicks for a date seems like bad UX.
Click to expand...

Fell in love with them while building MS Access databases and National Instruments LabVIEW for Windows data acquisition apps back in the 90s.

Set up the databases here as well in access, early 2000s. Then a few years ago we got onto Office 365, so had to remake everything in power apps. Still great with the combo boxes but just to try to get a last PM date for our vehicles, what a pain. I had to mash everything together, kind of sideways, can't even remember what the operation was called now. Get the MAX PM dates then pull out the relevant associated records. It was like a paragraph long statement that took a couple/few weeks to work out the syntax, but it works.
 
Wudang said:
The first time I used one myself was some JS widget someone recommended. It was a damned big list of possible values and I was amazed how responsive it was. I go back to Netscape and pre-gopher days.

On the flip side my doctors surgery decided patient verification should be my name and date of birth. They used a widget designed for appointments etc so you had to click "<" to go back a month. My birthdate was over 60 years ago and I may be picky but over 700 clicks for a date seems like bad UX.
Click to expand...

In my opinion, that sort of problem is caused by young (under 30) developers and a non-existent QA team. Or there is a QA team but it doesn't have very much imagination. Perhaps every QA team should have someone on it who's over 70. :)
 
Norman Alexander said:
On one occasion, a dropdown date I had to fill in for my birthday refused to go back more than 50 years. They must have had thousands of people born on 1-Jan-1970. I think that was a UNIX limitation...someone?
Click to expand...

That is the date when UNIX time starts, but it takes some imagination to make it a limitation in a user-facing application.
 
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