Forms that don’t work
It gets worse.
I thought yesterday’s post might be of some interest to the people who publish the Bulletin. I checked their Web site, and could find no e-mail address—in 2007, no e-mail address?—just a contact form. I’ve included it (scaled down) below, so you can see what I am talking about.
I duly entered my personal name and family name, etc. After the four identifying fields there is a bigger area labelled ‘Subject’. Odd label, I thought. This is normally used for a subject field, not a message field—but I didn’t want to be picky. I entered my message in the field, and clicked on the icon labelled ‘Submit.’ And what happened?
A message appeared in the ‘Status’ field saying “Subject Required !”
This happened no matter what I entered in any field. I could not submit the form. Have a go yourself, if you don’t believe me: www.costablanca-bulletin.com. (I can’t direct you straight to the form, since it’s a Flash site, and they make all the elementary errors designers usually make with Flash sites, like not letting you identify individual pages.)
Looking at the design, my guess is that they meant to include a proper ‘Subject’ field, but overlooked it, then gave the message field an internal id such as message, while labelling it ‘Subject’ for the visitor.
As for the error message, its curtness would be unforgivable even if I had been responsible for the error. It unerringly betrays the untrained amateur—someone who thinks that Web design is about HTML and pretty pictures, rather than about designing systems for people.
This unusable form is worse than the playground-style rudeness I identified (in another site) yesterday. It shows a fundamental lack of respect for visitors on the part of the site owners—and ignorance of elementary testing procedures on the part of the designers.