Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

Don’t make me remember details your database already knows

Two stupid things that are annoying me today:

When you call your mobile phone company, they ask you to type in your number. Why, then, does the operator always ask you for your phone number again when you get connected? I just told you!

I have a credit card with Egg.com. They’re generally one of the more clueful online financial institutions, but they have an interaction bug that always annoys me: if you want to make an additional payment to your card, here are the steps you have to go through:

• Log in
• Click on the credit card account
• Get to a page that shows your outstanding balance
• Click “Make a one-off payment”
• Get to a page with a box where you’re supposed to type in the amount you want to pay. A page which does not display your current balance anywhere.
• Curse yourself for not remembering it.
• Click “Back”
• Find the balance that you stupidly forgot to memorise down to the last penny.
• Copy it
• (optionally, pray that you haven’t somehow screwed up the browser session somehow by using the back button)
• Click “Make a one-off payment”
• Paste the balance into the field.
• Click OK

You know, one of the biggest down-sides to using Apple products (and good indie Mac software, I might add) is that you can never ever again not notice things that are stupidly designed like this.

What Would Jony Do?

The Self Assessment tax site is a bit like that, too. They show you a page with how much tax you need to pay, and there’s a button to make a payment. This then steps you through some choices of how you’d like to pay.

If you choose to pay online, you are then presented with a completely empty form, into which you’re expected to enter not only the amount you have to pay (which they know to the penny and you’ve just forgotten) but also all sorts of tax reference codes, which they simply *must* know as you’re logged in and they have all your tax information.

This is made more painful by the fact that you then have to go back two steps to get to the information. I think I just took a screen shot of it last time, as there were so many fields I needed.