Have you every gone to get gas, and went to lift the handle before you jammed in your credit card? Noooo! There's big warning stickers telling you to insert card first. Yes, I realize the point, pay before pumping. But if you lift the handle, god forbid, it takes 3 minutes for the cashier to reset the motherfucker so you can pay. They might even make you walk inside while they figure it out. Is it not possible to make a gas pump that let's you pay after you've lifted the handle? Not that you can pump gas, but it really shouldn't matter. They accept cash at the pump, you can even buy a carwash, but they can figure out how to make a pump that let's you buy more efficiently.
It's just like web form date parsing. The form will let you enter the date anyway you wish, even input letters, but if you use slashes (9/11/01) and it was looking for dashes (9-11-01), or a full 4-digit year... You may as well have entered Swahili. What would it be? 2 maybe 3 extra lines of code? C'mon. Get with it!
What's so hard about taking a few extra minutes during development to add these things. I'm sure thousands of hours are wasted by forcing the user to sort out the idiosyncrocies of your poor planning.
When the Saab 9000 engineers added that little flap of rubber to the trunk shelf, they knew what they were doing. Sure it probably added about 4 dollars to the price of the car. And it might add 2 minutes to the assembly time. But when the driver has to retrieve his spare tire, that little bit of rubber saves 10-20 minutes of hassle because the door to the sparetire storage is held up. No need to wrestle with it, no need to prop it open with the tire iron while you unscrew the tire retaining nut. It's all inclusive.
When you make a product more efficient from the beginning, people take note at the intended convenience.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld
*Update 9/22 @ 5:47pm*
To the Char-Meck Utilities:
Just noticed something when making an online payment of my water bill. When you have to enter your account number, it specifies to include the dashes. This is 2006, and there's amazing things you can do with web scripting languages, such as parse the number any way you please to insert the dash were appropriate for your data entry people to correctly read. For instance, my account number is 123456-7890123. With proper scripting, I should be able to enter 123-45-6789-0-123 or 1234567890123, and the script would pick out the unecessary dashes or add where needed. Just a little hint that would save a lot of time.
PS, you can do the same thing with dates and other form entries too!
kisses,
Ben Marvin
1 comment:
I dont think people would appreciate it as much if the older versions didnt have kinks. But they have been making cars and gas pumps for awhile so one would think there would be nothing left to add.
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