{"id":266,"date":"2012-02-18T18:39:07","date_gmt":"2012-02-19T02:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/?p=266"},"modified":"2012-02-18T18:39:07","modified_gmt":"2012-02-19T02:39:07","slug":"web-conocos-feedback-form-incompetence-proves-spages-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/web-conocos-feedback-form-incompetence-proves-spages-law\/","title":{"rendered":"web: Conoco&#8217;s feedback form incompetence proves SPage&#8217;s Law"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Conoco-Phillips-76 e-mails me that my February statement is available on their web site. No it isn&#8217;t, they only have statement activity. <em>I want to help companies do a better job<\/em>, so I try and tell them using their contact form (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.accountonline.com\/cards\/svc\/SecureMessageCenter.do\">Help &amp; Contact Us &gt; Email Customer Service<\/a>), but of course <a title=\"Blog post on (one of) SPage's Laws\" href=\"http:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/web-earthlink-bites-hand-that.html\">SPage&#8217;s Law<\/a> kicks in:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>SPage&#8217;s law: the part of every Web site with the most problems is the feedback form for reporting problems<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>The form subject line is only 37 characters, but there&#8217;s no warning, just a bizarre auto-advance to the next field so you don&#8217;t realize you just screwed up your e-mail and which also makes it difficult to correct.<\/li>\n<li>The tooltips won&#8217;t go away (and don&#8217;t activate when you make a mistake).<\/li>\n<li>The form thinks &#8220;comm@<em>{mysitename}<\/em>.com&#8221; is an invalid e-mail address.<\/li>\n<li>The tooltip says &#8220;Message can only be 20 lines maximum&#8221;, but there&#8217;s no immediate feedback if you go over. And 20 lines is meaningless, presumably it&#8217;s a certain number of characters.<\/li>\n<li>You&#8217;re only informed of the last two form problems <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em>after<\/em><\/span> you submit. It&#8217;s called &#8220;Client-side JavaScript form validation&#8221;!<\/li>\n<li>If the server detects a problem the page redisplays with error text in red (good), but it&#8217;s far from the form itself. The site should display errors next to the form fields!<\/li>\n<li>If the server detects a problem and the page redisplays it resets the Topic field to &#8220;Select one&#8221;, so after you correct one problem with the form and submit, you get an error that you didn&#8217;t select a topic!<\/li>\n<li>The form has repeatedly failed to submit messages of mine, but the only error message is &#8220;Please enter your message in the box below&#8221; My messages are less than 20 &#8220;lines&#8221;, one was only 345 characters&#8230; is that too much? I have no idea what the f***ing problem is, I just make random changes to the text.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>More woes outside this form:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Everything in the site navigation menu links to &#8216;#&#8217; (presumably it uses JavaScript to actually go to a page), so if you right-click any menu item and choose &#8220;Open Link in New Tab\/New Window&#8221;, the new tab contains exactly the same web page you were on before!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And it seems nobody answers their Online Technical Assistance phone number (1-877-345-9723) at the weekend, but they don&#8217;t tell you this on the web site or in the phone tree, you find out the hard way.<\/p>\n<p>A chain of incompetence that proves SPage&#8217;s Law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Conoco-Phillips-76 e-mails me that my February statement is available on their web site. No it isn&#8217;t, they only have statement activity. I want to help companies do a better job, so I try and tell them using their contact form &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/web-conocos-feedback-form-incompetence-proves-spages-law\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-laws","category-service","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}