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nilshendriks's stuff

Filed under: Annoyances

Dear ACRA / BizFile,

Recently I have had the displeasure of having to use one of your online forms. I can tell you: it is not a treat.

To quote Mr. Monk:

“Here's what happened”

A month ago or so I needed to get a business profile from Bizfile's website. The first thing I needed to do was change the address of the owner of nilshendriks.com (me) as I have moved recently. Otherwise the document would be mailed to my previous address. Obviously.

So I logged in at BizFile's site to make that change of address. The form in question is 'Changes in Business Particulars'. So far, so good but then it all went downhill from there.

The form would fill in fields I did not want to fill in, it returned errors of form fields where my name had been auto-filled and it said some fields were required but they were not indicated as required.

I called BizFile about this and a nice lady helped me at first. I was asked to take screen shots of the errors etc and e-mail those to them. So I did.

After a while of going back and forth they apparently couldn't solve my issues or maybe they could not recreate them and their final response (by phone) was:

“Sir, there are no issues with our form.”

I beg to differ.

Below you will find a list of issues your form “doesn't” have.

Of course there is plenty of room for more improvements and for that I suggest the following reading materials:

Related reading

  1. Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski - May 2008 (Rosenfled Media)

    If you do not want to buy the book, start out with these slides

  2. Forms that work

That's it for now.

Love,
Nils

PS: for those who would like to know: I completed the form by filling in the fields it apparently needs – even though I did not want to change any of this data – and submitting it. But a long journey it was.

  1. The 'steps' structure is not followed through.

    After step 1 you have to click the linked FIN number to get to your data and make changes. The 'next' button – instead of taking you to step 2 – goes back to the previous page. Doesn't make much sense.

  2. Auto-fill of fields and required fields

    On the actual form page some fields are being auto-filled in / selected. Nationality and Name to name a few.

    I have tried this as well with the auto-fill forms feature turned off in the browser. Same result.

    In the end it turns out these fields and drop down select lists are required, but they are not being indicated as being required.

    Please clearly indicate which fields are required.

  3. Fields current value and new value

    The form presents itself as a 'change data' form and therefor the way I read it is that if I fill in some field, that means I want to change it from the value it already had. The form clearly lists 'current' and 'change to' fields, so I think my understanding of it is correct.

    Example: there's a name field showing my name as the value it already has. I do not want to change my name. Heck, I do not think it is even legal to change my name like this. Point is, I do not want to change this data, the form however demands I fill this in. If not, it will not submit and keeps returning 'field required' messages.

  4. Date of Change of Name field

    It also fills in my name in the 'Date of Change of Name' field. Note again that I do not wish to change my name. Then of course after clicking submit ('save and next' button) it returns the following error:

    Error while adding Nominee detail : ORA-01858: a non-numeric character was found where a numeric was expected. Please contact Bizfile HelpDesk.

    Please use plain English for this. All it means is that there are characters other than numbers in a field. Characters your form has put there in the first place.

    If you put this message in English anyone can understand, there would not be a need to call the help desk.

    Well, of course the form should not fill this in at all anyway.

    Also it wouldn't hurt to point out which field any error message is referring to.

  5. Be clear. Help doesn't hurt.

    This may be due to English not being my mother tongue, but I do not know what a 'deed poll' is. I am sure everyone else in Singapore knows exactly what this means. /insert SagMark here.

  6. Address section

    The new address section could use some clarification. It took me a while to realize I had to first fill in my new ZIP code, click the search icon button and then it would reload the page with my new address filled in. None of these fields are editable except for the zip code and block number.

  7. Interfering with input text fields

    The date field at the bottom messes with my typing.
    It wants to make sure I follow the required format and automatically adds a forward slash (/) after typing the day number.

    I know you'll say this is 'to make it easier' but it's not and actually it is plain lazy back end programming.

    Let the user decide what format to use and deal with it at the back end.

Up Your Magenta, Deutsche Telekom!

After Orange and KPN it is now the turn for Deutsche Telekom to try to claim a colour.

In their case the colour is magenta as used in their corporate profile / brand identity. How many more court cases do we have to go through before companies grow up? Both Orange and KPN lost their cases, maybe because of different reasons but in the end: a colour by itself doesn't represent a brand identity, it's part of it, like the choice of typeface, size, logo and yes the use of white-space.

Hmm, maybe I can claim white-space?

In this case the lawyers of DT address companies in the IT and telecommunication business. Adobe is in the IT business aren't they? So I guess their software will have to remove the magenta swatches from their colour palettes. I am so happy I am not a DT or T-mobile customer anymore. Would be frustrating to know that your hard earned salary goes right into the pockets of those over-priced-nothing-better-to-do-lawyers of DT.

One word: ridiculous. Read more about this at outlaw.com Check out this initiative: Free magenta