I think there are great opportunities for sensible people to make money doing usability analyses of web based systems.
Let me give some examples of well intentioned systems with the obvious feature left out.
Email addresses
I have a Capitol One credit card, and in my user profile, there a place to enter an email address so they can send me stuff. (In another post I will rant about email addresses further) Recently I happened to log in to set up alerts for spending and so forth. The email notifications were disabled because, they said, the email address I had entered had been refused. Yet the address was actually correct.
This is not unknown. We had a crash a while back of our cloud email server, and we didn’t notice for hours, so it is possible mail was bounced.
There was no way to tell the Capitol One system “test it now please”. Instead, I had to change the address to a different one. This made them happy even without a test. I suppose I could then change it back, but how much time do I have to spend working around a bad design?
Phone numbers
Many sites require phone numbers. They have no uniform way of entry. Some have free form fields, but limited to exactly 10 characters. Some forbid hyphens. Some require hyphens. Some have exactly three fields, for area code, exchange, and number. Is it really that hard to parse a variety of formats? Do they really think making me keypunch my number is helping their image?
Notifications
I have my bank account and credit cards set up to send my text notifications when there is activity. One bank only allows notifications for amounts above $100. Why does that even make sense? They can handle small deposits, but they can’t handle sending a text for a $10 charge? At least the text on the page explains the limit.
A credit card company has the same feature, but allows texts for any transaction amount, except $0! If I want notificications on all transactions, what limit value should I use? I telephoned, and the agent suggested $0.01.
I’m getting to be a curmudgeon when things like this offend me.