REGISTRATION THAT WENT BAD
Recently I had the misfortune to experience quite a few usability flaws but this one completely went over my tolerance treshold and for that reason I decided to share it with you. With the release of the latest iPhone a campaign was started by one of the mobile phone providers in Bulgaria – Mtel. They organized an event that will take place later this month and since the number of spots is limited you must fill an online application. However the registration form for this event really “made my usability day”. Despite being in Cyrillic have faith in me for the translation. Here is a screenshot from the form itself:
It requires from the user to enter his e-mail address, full name, mobile number and select from a drop-down the city he lives in … quite simple right? As you can see I have filled everything with what I believed and still believe to be correct data, but can you suggest what happened when I clicked on the register button? … I ended up here:
After some seconds spent in inspecting the possible reason for the error it turned out that the format that I used for my mobile number was not exactly as the placeholder suggested – I added an additional interval between the country code and the first part of the number. And the result, as you can see, is that all the information I had filled in just a few seconds ago was gone and all fields were marked to contain invalid data. Whyyyyyyyy? I was left with only one option - to retype everything. Yes I know it is only three text fields but does that really matter. Since only my mobile number was "incorrect', then why did the website clear my e-mail and name information as well? Remember one of the most important rules in designing usable products? – “Never lose the user’s content” Furthermore, we all know that computers are stupid right, but it’s not that hard to parse a phone number, leaving only the digits and then checking whether it is valid or not. There are so many possible ways and standards for entering it that it is really naïve to assume that your users will use only one particular pattern. And a big company like Mtel should not make such elementary mistakes, not that smaller companies should be tolerated to do so. I hope you have enjoyed my story and expect some more soon :)