Written by Dick CarlsonLosing football coaches always talk about how they didn’t deliver 
on the fundamentals. I’ve been annoyed, lately, by the number of web interactions that seem to fail on the very simple metric of pain. The more pain you cause me in your process, the less likely I’m going to complete the experience.
It’s often the little things that are just completely unnecessary, that some coder or anal-retentive type thought would be a good idea. So just to make sure that nothing could possibly go wrong, they put up a silly barrier.
Example #1: Entering The “Year” For My Credit Card I buy lots of stuff online (well, too much) and each time they want to know the month and year of my card expiration. OK, fair enough. Buy why must you make me enter a four digit year? I lived through the Y2K non-event, and I understand the issue. But wait a minute — is it possible that my card actually expires in 1910? 3010? Not Freakin’ Likely
So just write a little script that lets me enter two digits, and then adds “20″ to the front. I can’t imagine that we’d have a lot of trouble in the next several hundred years.
Example #2: Phone Numbers
I often find an online form that errors out because I entered a dash in my phone number — the way the entire world does — and the system wants only numbers. (Don’t believe me? Try to log in at T-Mobile!) If your developer can’t write a script that filters this, fire him/her and I’ll get you one with a brain.
Example #3: Skip To Next Field When I’m entering a series of items (like a software serial number) and you have five fields, after I enter the first characters the entry point should automatically skip to the next field. Again, if your dev says “no” just give me a call — operators are standing by.
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How are you performing on the fundamentals? What grinds your gears?
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I couldn’t agree more with you! Sometimes its the easy stuff that the programmers leave out that drives me nuts and then other times its the complex stuff they add that just as ridiculous. I’ve spent lots of wasted time just trying to get a simple one page document in Word formatted right. Why is that so hard?