Yes! You are correct! There was no indication at all of errors or missing data. There WERE a couple screens that required me to scroll down and accept terms, but the final screen was not one of this type.
My company’s HR health/dental enrollment website is this way. Click through a bunch of screens of personal and dependent data entry, select providers and network doctors, and hit submit and the submit button turns from inviting green to inactive grey with no other changes to the page. No confirmation number, no new page, nothing. Did it really submit? Were my changes accepted? Will I be insured for the next year? Who the hell knows.
Yes, that’s as awful as not giving a hint or help with insufficiently filled out forms. I had that happen a few times, too. As I mentioned above, I used to be a developer, but like every other developer I was also a user, so I took user concerns into account when writing apps. That’s why I cannot understand how these blunders happen.
This is stretching the definition of “software design” since there is sensory and display hardware involved as well as software, but my partner’s 2007 Mitsubishi is currently showing an orange alert on the dashboard: “Service Engine Soon”.
“Well, that’s freaking informative”, I said, and dug out the car manual.
Car manual says this light can come on because
• the gas filler cap wasn’t put on tightly enough; or
• the car is overdue for a maintenance visit; or
• it’s low on oil; or
• something else, for further details go purchase a DeviceNet module and it will interpret the codes
Why the fuck can’t an informative message show up on the dashboard? “Gas tank isn’t airtight; check gas cap” ; “oil pressure low (xx lbs)”; “air-fuel mixture is erratic; get a tune-up”; “you are overdue for general maintenance check” or whatever?
What I’m being provided with is about as useful as a debugger message that just says “a problem occurred”.
My biggest problem with that is the problem could be mostly harmless (overdue for maintenance), or it could be catastrophic if you keep driving for too long (low on oil), but there’s no way to know. (Unless I guess the check engine is meant to serve as a general warning, letting you know you need to look at the oil pressure gauge)
Oh, yes, brings back bad memories of the Pontiac Montana we used to own. We loved the car, except if you tightened the gas cap two clicks (instead of one), the SES light came on. The only way to clear the error was to take it to our local dealer, who could clear it in about two minutes, at no charge. PITA.
It’s not just laziness. A lazy developer would just use an existing standard implementation, that has those features. It’s a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect where the incompetent developers think that they can make something from scratch that’s better than the standard solutions. Or they’re so incompetent that they don’t even know of the existence of the standard solutions.