Make Your Users Life Easier Not Yours

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:40:00 GMT

I was checking in online last night for a flight and came across a classic example of asking the user for perfect user input when it would be easy for the programmers to simply clean up any bad data. In situtations like this I believe the onus is on us, developers and programmers, to make our users lifes easier not ours.

Lets look at an example, the Southwest online check in screen which has the following bizarre instruction: "Confirmation Numbers use the letters O and I instead of the numbers 0 (zero) and 1 (one)."

Fixing any user input on the server side could be achieved very easily with a simple RegEx making the page both easier to use and clear of instructions.

A quick note about Southwest: I actually have a lot of luv for Southwest and without them would see my relatives a lot less.

Another quick note: I'm sure I have made my users lives harder than need be in the past with fields like this (though I have also discovered a recent fondness for the masking features in cfform).

The First Post

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:59:53 GMT

The first post. I've decided to start a blog primarily because I like writing. And having been a programmer for the last 10 years I haven't written much during that time. I also realize I like writing about technical issues and have a fair amount on my mind at the moment so it seems like a good time to start a blog. Note, I did not say I was a grammatically correct writer. So, expect the odd typo and grammatically incorrect sentence from time to time. This is a blog and I'm not going to use the grammar corrector in Word before posting.

I am also intrigued by social networking so InstantSpot seemed a good spot (pun intended) to start my blog.

I aim to cover a bunch of topics, some tutorials and explanations of basic ColdFusion functionality, thoughts on the future of the web and ColdFusion, conferences, and anything else that comes up. I will mostly be focusing on ColdFusion (and will probably start using cf as an abbreviation real soon) though I do hope to post on other non-cf topics like JavaScript, MySQL and databases in general and who knows what else in the future.

I am not going to aim to publish on a regular basis and have pledged to keep this blog a purely non-work time activity. I'm busy enough there anyway. Good busy. I also don't believe blogs die. So if I have nothing good or interesting to say I will say nothing. I also don't think this will turn into a news blog with short entries and links to the latest news. There are enough of those, and, I rely on them for my tech-news as much as anywhere else. In short, if you like what you are reading I suggest using the RSS feeds or subscribing over email.

More to come...

RSS feed for InstantSpot site Sam Farmer's ColdFusion Blog

Make Your Users Life Easier Not Yours

The First Post