Website mistakes that are easily fixed
hanselman.com
Website mistakes that are easily fixed
1–10 of 70 posts
Re: Website mistakes that are easily fixed
#2So true. It's frustrating to see people spend hundreds of hours to advance some "fringe" web technologies that don't really affect much in the end, while stuff that we use every day, everywhere continues to have the same (solvable) issues year after year.
Re: Website mistakes that are easily fixed
#3At the end of the day, it's never about what we can do, it's what we can do within the budget and time that we think is appropriate for what we want to do.
Re: Website mistakes that are easily fixed
#4Asking for city, state and zip code is my favorite on the list. Plus the country should be asked for first then if US only get the street and zip code.
There was a link on HN sometime ago that showed that people trusted the form/page more when complete address information was requested (I believe the conclusion was that people were used to doing it that way) so maybe there is a downside to the shorter version.
Re: Website mistakes that are easily fixed
#5Asking for city, state and zip code is my favorite on the list. Plus the country should be asked for first then if US only get the street and zip code. There was a link on HN sometime ago that showed that people trusted the form/page more when complete address information was requested (I believe the conclusion was that people were used to doing it that way) so maybe there is a downside to the shorter version.
I always find it jarring when a site does this inference since it's so uncommon and really doesn't save much time or mental capacity.
Re: Website mistakes that are easily fixed
#6Asking for city, state and zip code is my favorite on the list. Plus the country should be asked for first then if US only get the street and zip code. There was a link on HN sometime ago that showed that people trusted the form/page more when complete address information was requested (I believe the conclusion was that people were used to doing it that way) so maybe there is a downside to the shorter version.
I always find it jarring when a site does this inference since it's so uncommon and really doesn't save much time or mental capacity.
Yep it is one of those things that is deeply ingrained. It doesn't save much time but I believe if you don't need to ask for it, then don't. Asking for it only increases the chance of users entering something incorrectly.
Re: Website mistakes that are easily fixed
#7Accept-Language header is not reliable esp for non-English speaking countries. Many computers/browsers are by default EN, esp if the O/S doesn't support local language.
For example, Indonesians speak and read Bahasa all the time, but most browsers there report EN.
Re: Website mistakes that are easily fixed
#8Asking for city, state and zip code is my favorite on the list. Plus the country should be asked for first then if US only get the street and zip code. There was a link on HN sometime ago that showed that people trusted the form/page more when complete address information was requested (I believe the conclusion was that people were used to doing it that way) so maybe there is a downside to the shorter version.
Funny. This is the one to which I had the most negative response. Zipcodes are terrible for inferring anything geographically interesting. A single zipcode is just a collection of USPS postal routes; nothing more, nothing less. They don't have to be contained within a single city, or even a single state, nor do they have to be contiguous, and they can overlap with one another. New ones are also added all the time, and no publicly available databases of them handle any of these problems well. Most applications that try to use them for anything end up running across edge cases that show users incorrect data, often without ever realizing it. It's especially unfortunate because so many startup-y people live in urban areas where zipcodes cover small, regular geographic areas, and have no idea they're potentially creating terrible user experiences for people who live elsewhere.
For a particular case study of sorts, see: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/01/19/dont-use-zipco...
Re: Website mistakes that are easily fixed
#9Asking for city, state and zip code is my favorite on the list. Plus the country should be asked for first then if US only get the street and zip code. There was a link on HN sometime ago that showed that people trusted the form/page more when complete address information was requested (I believe the conclusion was that people were used to doing it that way) so maybe there is a downside to the shorter version.
I always find it jarring when a site does this inference since it's so uncommon and really doesn't save much time or mental capacity.
As a webmaster you should also know your audience too. It may be cool for you to do this if your target traffic is hacker news, but for non tech savvy people it will only confuse them more.
Some people are also mistrusting of tech magic as well. I say this because one of our site deals with eBay sellers and I remember this duffer person complain that we were somehow hacking his ebay account getting information he never gave us (the title, description of his auctions when all we knew was his id)
Re: Website mistakes that are easily fixed
#10> There can be a whole list of languages in the Accept-Language header, in the order the user prefers them! Use that data, it's there for you to use.
Yet it takes only jumping a plane for a few hours to get Google to think I can and want to read Georgian. Google's i18n for anonymous users (I'm not logged in on my phone's browser) is the most ridiculous I've experienced, every border I cross I get a different language.