A little bit of this, a little bit of that

Ah yes, technology….the panacea of our generation. Technology has usually been billed as that which will make our lives easier, allow us to be more productive. The reality of it is that these days, with some exceptions, technology tends to put us into a rigid box, not that adapts to us, but requires us to be socialized to it…which in essense defeats the ‘makes our life easier’ clause.

I’ve run into a few examples of this…I’ve got 2 from my favorite online bill application from AT&T. The first that got me was when entering a credit card, their application notes underneath: “Please, no dashes or spaces”. Honestly, that’s retarded and lazy, not to mention makes it difficult on the end-user. Without putting dashes or spaces (or having to remove them by hand when ready to submit) it makes it extremely difficult to verify I’ve entered the correct numbers and thus will _increase_ the possibility of multiple page reloads because a user has entered an invalid card number. It’s odd to me this request, because I know from experience that it’s fairly straightforward to remove said characters easily, both on the client side and on the server side, so it’s absurd to put that burden on the end user.

The second is similar….when entering an amount to pay via credit card, I entered the amount to pay….say 47 with no decimal place or following digits. When submitting, the ATT application whined that I did not put in a decimal. Again, I know from experience that it only takes 3-4 lines of relatively simplistic code to do so for the user on the client side.

I have the same question about the ATMs….why is it that when withdrawing cash I have to smack the zero key two extra times ? The ATM doesn’t give change (and never has)…why not simply put the logic into the software to do that? I know it’s not a space issue….with the advent of color touch screens, many banks have invested in very pretty interfaces that can’t be small in size. Why not just ask for the whole dollar amounts? It adds a small amount of testing, but you’re making enough off of investing my money and charging me fees for how you don’t like me using it that I’d love for you to put a couple hours towards making it easier for me.

So to continue the rant…how about Arco? Years ago, they added their PayPoint system to be able to pay for gas at the island rather than having to go into the store or to build cash and credit-accepting machines into every pump. But for the life of me, I don’t understand why I have to do it in _their_ order rather than mine. For instance, walk up to a pay point and it has 2 options: pay for gas, get receipt. If you walk up and stick in your card, the software throws an error: select pump, THEN insert card when prompted. Why? If I walk up and stick my card into the machine, I doubt I’m going to be interested in getting a receipt. Simply ask me which pump number and if the order _really_ matters, then just hang onto my card info and ask for the proper details in the right order. Same if I walk up and start feeding money into the machine. Its easy enough to flag with a receipt should you choose to cancel or flag with the operator in the store.

Some of us computer geeks have decently paying jobs because many of our friends want to not worry about the details with computers and software…they’re just trying to do what they need to do and these days, it requires a computer. Let’s try to make life easier on them (and at the same time on our fellow computer geeks who have to support our errors) and try to put real thought into what we do rather than just get ‘er done.