102 lines
5.1 KiB
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102 lines
5.1 KiB
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From fork-admin@xent.com Mon Sep 30 13:52:48 2002
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<0H35003JGMYX9G@mta7.pltn13.pbi.net> for fork@xent.com; Sat,
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28 Sep 2002 08:28:09 -0700 (PDT)
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From: Gregory Alan Bolcer <gbolcer@endeavors.com>
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Subject: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station
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To: FoRK <fork@spamassassin.taint.org>
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Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 08:18:17 -0700
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What's wrong with doing business over the Web? Web forms. There's
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promising replacements forms, but this is the current state of the
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industry:
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o You find something that you want to fill out. It's a partnership form,
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a signup for a Web seminar, a request for more information, anything.
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o You start wasting time typing in all those stupid fields and spend
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about 10 minutes going through all their stupid qualification hoops
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just to get a small piece of information , whitepaper, or a callback
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when halfway through, you start to wonder if it's really worth your
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time to forever be stuck on their stupid prospect list.
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o Pull down tags are never put in order of use instead of alphabetized.
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I was on a site just now that had every single country in the world
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listed; the selection of your country was absolutely critical for you
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to hit submit, but due to the layout, the "more>" tag on the second
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row was offscreen so it was impossible to select any country except
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about two dozen third world countries.
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o Even worse, ever time you hit submit, all forms based things complain
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about using the universal country phone number format and will cause
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you to re-enter dashes instead of dots.
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o When you get something that's not entered right, you will go back and
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enter it right, but then some other field or most likely pulldown will
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automatically get reset to the default value so that you will have to
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go back and resent that freaking thing too. Finally after all combinations
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of all pulldowns, you may get a successful submit.
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o You wait freaking forever just to get a confirmation.
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o Sometimes, like today, you won't be able to ever submit anything due
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to it being impossible to ever submit a valid set of information that
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is internally non-conflicting according to whatever fhead wrote their
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forms submission.
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What's wrong with this picture? The company is screwing you by wasting
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your time enforcing their data collection standards on you. I'm sure there's
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someone in that company that would be willing to accept "US", "U.S", "USA"
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"United States", "U of A", "America", etc. and would know exactly which
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freaking country the interested party was from instead of forcing them
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to waste even more time playing Web form geography.
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I'm starting to see the light of Passport. You want more information? Hit
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this passport button. Voila. IE6 and Netscape 6,7 have pre-forms sutff,
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but I always turn it off because you never know when there's that one field
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that you don't want to submit to the person you are submitting to that
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automatically gets sent, i.e. the privacy stuff is well beyond the
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average user who will get screwed on privacy stuff.
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So, if crappy forms-based submission is the state of practice for
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business enablement on the Web, I can't see this whole data submission
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and hurry up and wait for us to get back to you business process as
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working all that well.
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Greg
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