The other night I came home to find Lisa, my wife, rapidly losing patience with house.co.uk. All she wanted to do was register on this award winning site and pay our gas and electricity bill. She said so matter what she did the site would not accept her user name. She tried loads of different combinations of user name but the error message kept coming back, “There is a problem with your user name”. “It must be something I’m doing wrong” she said. So I said I’d take a look while she went to try and bring her blood pressure back down!
So I tried a few different user name combinations, all of which kept coming back with the same “problem with your user name” error. So I took another closer look at the form on the registration page. And there was the problem. It wasn’t the user name that was at fault but the password Lisa had chosen. The site needed a six character or more password, yet Lisa had tried using a five character one. But the thing is, the error message that kept coming back told her that the user name was at fault, not the password. This is just pure laziness on the developers part. Rather than have 2 separate error messages they’ve opted for one global message on the user name password combo. And that is just down to words on a screen. Shaft all to do with technical bobbins. It all comes down to the simplicity of the written word. In this case the words were wrong and because of it the whole system came crashing down.
Popularity: 6% [?]
i regularly lose patience with that site…
sadly, it’s not just the login form that’s badly written - the rest of the site has some serious usability issues too.
Joshua / 06/01/2004