Let me ask you, new reader who thinks Ben is the coolest guy around ....
If you came across a form on a webpage that contained the following...
Would you assume that the grey'ed out column is:
- An invalid/not available column, so leave it blank?
- A column that shouldn't be used, so leave it blank?
- Just a funny colored column, and try to enter text into it?
- That the "Prod Code" and "Prod Descr" columns are tied together behind the scenes and that you can/should use either to look up the valid value for other by entering a valid value into one, and hitting CTRL+SPACE to see a list of possible values ... and that when a value is selected, it will populate both fields with their correct values?
If you guessed 1 or 2, you have some clue about UI standards (or at least use web forms enough to know the conventions. If you guessed 3, you are an adventurous S.O.B., but you would have had to have guessed 4 to be correct.
I ran into this issue with an application today while at work. Lovely little thing didn't have any sort of explaination suggesting thats what should be done, or validation to tell you you did the wrong thing. Just a Java exception a few minutes later when you tried to update the record from a different page.
3 comments:
This is dumb but not all that surprising.
UI Standards / guidelines simply are ignored in most large businesses that don't cater their applications to external customers.
For example, if you look at Progressive.com we do everything we can to try and make our quoting application highly usable. However, if you looked at our internal only applications like Claimstation we live by the mantra that "we can train to that"
The result is spending exorbant amounts on training the simplest things because we dont want to spend half as much up front adhering to good UI design principles.
Like the blog title
Could change the picture to Joe Morgan?
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