The site that Bytegeist linked to touched on this one –
US-centric address fields!
Not everybody lives in the U. S. of A. Please don’t ask us to select one of the 50 states from a drop-down menu. I know you’re sometimes very generous and include Puerto Rico, Guam and the US Minor Outlying Islands as well, but that really doesn’t help much.
And no, I have not entered an “invalid zip code”. My postcode goes letter-letter-digit-digit-space-digit-letter-letter, and I’m not about to alter it just so I can continue to the next stage of your poxy registration form. :mad:
That one annoys me, but not nearly as much as it does my cousins, who have no zip or postal code. Yeah. That’s right. Even the call-centres of international delivery companies can’t get their heads around it (or to be specific, even their computers won’t accept it).
If it’s any consolation, pull-down menus with all 50 U.S. states are just as infuriating to me — and I live here. It’s enough to make me reconsider the purchase I’m making.
And pull-down menus with all the state postal codes (as opposed to their full names) are even more inane. Unless you live in one of the ‘A’ states, it takes about five times longer to select the damn code from the menu as it does to type the two letters.
(Ah, feels good to vent. Thanks for listening, people.)
A corrolary is shopping sites that can’t comprehend APO and FPO addresses and their state codes (AA, AE and AP) as valid addresses that the US Mail will deliver to with no troubles.
ooh ooh ooh! I just thought of a comically bad example!
I’ve been told that it’s since been fixed, but in a not-too-long-ago version of .NET Studio, if you open up help to get some example code, then cut and paste it into your working code, it pastes as HTML with a bunch of errant tags around everything. In order to get a clean paste you need to paste somewhere else first, then cut and paste that!
Agreed – Mac users will not put up with annoying crap that non-Mac users shrug off all the time. Even Mac shareware/freeware tends to be of a higher quality than what you’d find on other platforms.
My theory is that it’s because we’re so used to perfection, the slightest imperfection sticks out like a sore thumb to us.
WS_FTP (a pretty decent FTP client) uses a train whistle sound when it opens a connection, and a little-girl “uh=oh” when the connection fails. Cracks people up.
Uhhh … I’ve yet to encounter a pull-down with either states or two-letter postal codes that wouldn’t, once you got to it and typed the first letter of your state, move automatically to the first state beginning with that letter. If you then click on or drag the scroll bar, you only hafta look at the few states beginning with that letter[sup]1[/sup].
Works the same with selecting a month
I thought everyone knew that.
My sympathies to the people living in places which use more complex postal zoning than the U.S. 5 +4 zip, and who get hung up on fields set up to accept only numeric input.
[sup]1[/sup]as in when you hafta indicate birth month or credit/debit card expiration month, whether numeric or alpha display. I’m not saying that every one does; just that I haven’t seen any that didn’t. Isn’t it a behavior structured into DOS, still setting underneath after all these years? :dubious: OTOH, is my rememberer screwy, or don’t you also select that way from a system menu under a UNIX-type OS (and which only accepts a one character choice)? IOW, that in an isolated window with scripted alphanumeric responses, the OS is structuring the input choices (to go into a DB that the form is writing to)? The input ain’t part of the GUI, is it? Or have I gone totally off it?
Well, keep looking. They are certainly around, particularly on the Web, because the standard HTML form widgets are often implemented minimally. No doubt there’s variety in widget behavior depending on which browser and OS you’re running. Most such menus I encounter do not respond to keypresses, whether you’ve selected them or not.
In any case, a simple short text field would be more than adequate for the task.
That’s a shame. I’ve been using Windoze since 1992, and don’t recall a time when I couldn’t get the response described. Of course I’ve never used IE, except briefly in emergencies, or when using someone else’s machine. The Univ where I worked installed Mosaic, and ran it until Netscape came out. They went to Netscape and stayed there, at least through when I went on disability. And I installed Netscape on my home computer when I started going online from home.
Hey, I’m on your side; don’t shoot. I wasn’t disagreeing, you know. Typing two letters is easier than the method I described, but that doesn’t work. I was just telling what did work.
I’m no fan of pull-down boxes with every country in the world either - especially when the names are written in full, but they are ordered by country code. Clearly, with a country like the United States (US) or France (FR), this won’t be too big a deal. However, if your country is like Switzerland (CH), it’ll take you a while to find it nestling below Congo! :mad:
I have seen this more than once, though it seems to be becoming less common.
Agilent Chemstation : Why is the Help option the very first one on every menu that appears with a right-click? If I want to turn on the pump on the UV station, for example, the options are Help | Pump CW | Pimp CCW| Pump Off|. Do you know how many times I’ve seen the help file in the past 6 months?? Not to mention the fact that you can’t set it up in such a way as to see the spectrum AND the values obtained at the same time. And every time you switch between the new views, it must recalculate every piece of data, slowing everything down to a near standstill. Awful piece of software. And that’s just the UV program!
The one for the HPLCs have a gazillion stupid features too, such as the inability to reprocess and directly provide you with a report - you either have to print it (waste of paper), or know where to find an HTML version (which you had to ask for), or save it to a file on the hard disk (which we cannot write to for security reasons at my job). I’ve gotten into the habit of using the HTML version, but 99% of my coworkers don’t know how to use it, and aid to the butchery of countless trees on a daily basis because they print their data just to make sure that the numbers are as they should be. Apparently Agilent has never heard of the Print Preview concept
NuGenesis (electronic documentation software - apprently only runs well in IE, which is a whole other rant). Type in User Name. Type in Password. Hit Enter…nothing happens. You MUST use the mouse to hit the Authenticate button. I’ve attempted to Tab to it, and it skips it completely. If you request to open a file, and your log-in has timed out, it brings you back to the log-in page, where you reenter your password and it returns you to the file list but does not proceed to execute the command that you asked for. You then have to reselect the file(s) you want and reopen them, which is sometimes a pain in the ass when you want to open several! Then there’s the “You cannot (electronically) sign this report until all pages have been viewed” feature, which is [sarcasm]WONDERFUL[/sarcasm] when you have several hundred-page HPLC printouts to sign. Oh, and when you log in, if you type the wrong password, you are able to proceed 2 screens into the software before it tells you that your login was incorrect. WTF is up with that? And on the page where it says your login was incorrect, you don’t have the option to log in there - you have to click the Log Out button and begin the process all over again. And the button for “Refresh” is an exclamation mark. Who would have thought? And every time you change your password (required every 45 days) all your user preferences are reset to default.
I hate these two pieces of software, and I have to use them on a daily basis at my job. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Agreed…but I wouldn’t have a problem with regular dropdowns…if they didn’t have every fucking option possible so that scrolling the menu is impossible. So many times I’ve found that one mouse-scroll-click down from United Arab Emirates takes me to Uzbekistan. Very useful.
No - the main problem is with people outside the US, who have no zip code, no postcode, nothing. Because it neither exists nor is necessary.
Yup. There are no postcodes in Ireland, outside of Dublin and (IIRC) Cork, and even then they are only one digit - e.g. I live in Dublin 7, Ireland.
And in Hong Kong, there are a few locations whose entire international address is something like:
10 High Street
Hong Kong
That’s it.
The sooner Web database designers realise that you can in fact be flexible, the better. You don’t need this shit, and making your database only accept 5-digit numerical strings for postcodes is totally bloody idiotic. Same applies to international databases that only accept US-style XXX XXX XXXX phone numbers.
Sorry if my remark came across as huffy. It certainly wasn’t written with that intent.
As our foreign friends have shown us (if we didn’t know already), any America-specific address formats should be an obviously bad idea for any on-line business — or at least those that don’t want to turn away international sales needlessly.
The state/country names always work by typing the first letter (and typing it again to go to the next on the list). And a drop-down list prevents typoes, so it makes sense to use it.
What I do find ridiculous is drop-down date of birth lists. A typo isn’t likely, and if you were born in the 20th century, pressing a “1” doesn’t do you much good.
Ouch! I’m one of those guys. Problem is, you want to do some sort of validation on the address to make sure it’s valid, and pretty much none of the rules that apply to US addresses apply to international addresses. Usually you end up putting in a little checkbox that says “International Address” or something - if that is checked, the only thing you can really insest on is that the Line 1 of the address field has something in it, and the user has selected a country. Usually I would enforce that the city was filled in as well, but jjimm’s example:
10 High Street
Hong Kong
…breaks even that rule!
What’s my point? It’s just as frustrating designing these things sometimes, especially with US vs. international addresses. Other stuff (bad colors, the incredibly bad functionality like mnemosyne described, etc.) is not acceptable.
I thought everyone knew that.