John K. Hinsdale wrote:
> DA Morgan wrote:
>> Define a discard file and send those records back to be fixing.
>>
>> Covering for other people's inadequacies is a recipe for working
>> evenings and weekends. And no one will remember you did it three
>> weeks later except to expect you to do it yet again.
>
> I once worked on a web site that took credit card orders.
> The web site instructions said to "please enter the
> credit card number with NO spaces or dashes." It said this
> very loudly, to the point of distraction. Try as they might,
> users entered their credit card numbers with spaces and dashes.
> These were rejected by the system. In fact, the system went
> so far as to detect dashes and say specifically "hey, you had
> a dash in there! take it out!" This behavior was known to
> management but not considered an issue since it was advertised
> that the dashes and spaces were required.
>
> After some time, management did a usability analysis of how
> many users coming to the site, and initiating a purchase
> transaction, but were able to complete the purchase. This is the
> part I was hired to do. We discovered a lot people bailing out
> at the credit card form, specifically after typing in a card
> # with the correct digits, but with those annoying dashes and
> spaces. It didn't take long to understand why they did so:
> the delimiters appear on both their card (as spaces) and
> statements (as dashes) and serve to help chunk up the 16
> or so digits so as to enable easy visual verification. It's
> precisely these people who were making an effort to get the
> correct numbers into the form. Tthere were many other users
> who bailed after entering invalid digits, but far fewer than
> the dashes-and-spaces people.
>
> The usability analysis revealed that about 15% of purchase
> transactions were lost on the last screen due to the dashes
> and spaces thing. I proposed that we simply strip non-digits
> form the form input and use that as the card number. I presented
> a one-line implementation in perl. During this proposal the
> original site developer objected, saying that "if these users
> cannot follow the instructions, we don't want their money."
>
> I'll let you guess what management did with this
> developer ;)
>
> -- JH
Same thing I'd do. But that is different from the situation in which
the OP found him or her self. And, quite frankly, that is a front-end
issue that should have been dealt with by front-end coders who should
be required to pass information to the database in a consistent manner
that supports data integrity.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)
Puget Sound Oracle Users Group
www.psoug.org
Received on Sun Feb 11 2007 - 12:12:31 CST
