DMGWeb Forms
Oh, baby. People, we need to do better here. Web forms suck, and I suspect they're a major reason more people don't use online services.
I just donwloaded a JDBC driver from IBM's support site. Before I could download, I had to give them my company's postal address. What possible impact does that have on downloading a JDBC driver? No idea. But that's another rant for another time.
The real problem was that there were multiple required fields (marked with red asterisks), and I missed a couple on my first run through the form. (I didn't sleep well last night, if you must know.) So when I submitted the form, expecing a download page, I got... the same form again, with a message in red at the top: "The information you have entered is invalid. Please try again."
So I double checked, got one of the missing fields filled in, and submitted the form. And again, was met with "The information you have entered is invliad. Please try again."
Which field did I miss? Invalid how? Bad formatting? Missing completely? What? No clue. "Invalid. Try again."
And just as I thought I was about to finally get the files I needed to do my job, I clicked "I comfirm" (as opposed to "I cancel", are the folks at IBM native English speakers?), and got:
Missing required fields.
You must agree to the terms of the license before you proceed
message code: 52e
Only at IBM would "message code: 52e" be considered handy information for the user. As it turns out, you have to both click the little "I agree" checkbox and click "I confirm."
I feel a little like the kid digging through a twelve-foot-high pile of manure: "There's gotta be a pony under here somewhere!"
Error conditions are not errors, they are opportunities for clarification, for dialog with the user. I used to live in an apartment building with the street adress 805, which happens to also be a local telephone area code. I'd get into a lot of frustrating exchanges:
GUY: Address?
ME: 805--
GUY: No, your address.
ME: Yeah. 805--
GUY: No, sir. I need your street address.
ME: I live at 805 Paseo Ponderosa...
GUY: Oh! Oh, okay.
ME: ...apartment 231...
The guy's reponse was the equivalent of just yelling "ERROR!" Things migh have gone much more easily if he'd just let me keep talking. Or clarified with, "Sir, are you sure that your street number is 805?"
Anyway, I'm tempted to go home tonight, fix a few bugs, then start work on a set of custom tags for better handling of form input errors. Maybe something like Netflix's little word balloon pop-ups. Floating error messages that specify the problem, and point right to where it's happening. They'd all appear immediately when the user hit "submit", and disappear as the problems were fixed. Clicking "submit" before they were cleared would pop the user back to the field that needs fixing.
Yep. In my copious free time.