Lazy designers

Saw the following on http://www.kuvalehdet.fi/lahjalehti:

Kirjoita 8-numeroinen asiakasnumerosi ilman kirjaintunnusta. Jos asiakasnumerossasi on yhdeksän merkkiä, jätä ensimmäinen nolla pois. Jos asiakasnumerosi on lyhyempi kuin 8-numeroa., lisää tarvittava määrä nollia numeron eteen.

Roughly translated as: "Type in your 8-digit customer code. If your customer code has nine digits, leave the first zero out. If it has less than 8 digits, add a suitable number of zeros in front of it."

Excuse me? Writing a piece of code which does that automatically - even in Javascript, in the browser - is the kind of an exercise you give to a first-year programming student right after the first "Hello World" -program.

Why burden the user with the complexities and rules of the underlying database?




Comments

That's exactly why there's so much business for companies like us to do in this industry. Lot's of simple mistakes where companies are tech oriented instead of being customer oriented.

--Antti, 26-Jan-2008


It was probably more expensive to pay the copywriter to come up with clear enough instructions than it would have been for the first-year programmer to fix the code...

--Niko, 09-Feb-2008


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"Main_blogentry_260108_2" last changed on 26-Jan-2008 13:33:51 EET by JanneJalkanen.