Written by:CrashDome9/24/2007 11:44 AM
This is partially a rant and partially a duck. It's like that odd animal with a duck-bill and looks like a beaver... what was that again? oh yeah.. Dana Carvey.Ok back to my rant.... as a software programmer, I get alot of UI questions. The most horrendous and annoying questions ever asked of me usually involve typing. For some reason, somewhere along the line, the idea of "typing" words into the computer became standardized somehow to include the following:ONLY CAPITAL LETTERSOccasional Missing VowlsExcessive - uses of the - dash instead of - oh I don't know - using perhaps a paranthesis - or a colon - or some other punctuation markIt might be that every person who works for my company types with two fingers. It might be the fact they have never heard that one can change a font size, shape, color, etc. Whatever the reason might be, it gives me great pain in my head region whenever I hear things like:"Can you make it so everything I type is programmatically & automatically capitalized? Regardless of whether I have Caps Lock on or not?""Can I just get a list of all 1000+ options for our two-letter-defined location areas and just click the one I want rather than type it in?""Why do I have to enter the name of the person on one field and the product in another field? Can I just type them in all in one line and seperate them with a dash?"and my ALL-TYME PERSONAL FAVRITE:"Can I get a spell checker for that name field? Oh, and I want all the letters to be captialized all the time."These, I will admit are not 'actual' quotes but rather summations of things I encounter... a lot. What prompted this entry was actually a request by someone to have an entry field for our inventory locations (Made up of one letter and one number, e.g. A1) converted automatically to uppercase despite the way it is entered. Now, I am all for this idea because of two things. One, if you enter it in lowercase, it is treated as a different location (bad design of some other brilliant programmer and not I). Two, it is generally a good thing to correct things you can easily find out are mistakes of the user. What really bites at me though... deep down inside... is the fact it is a SINGLE letter. Apparently, it IS too difficult for people to grasp that they need to hit the "shift" key when they enter that letter. Not intuitive from a design point-of-view, I understand that and that is why I will try and see if I can implement this. From an ethical point-of-view, I find this demoralizing that people cannot complete the simplist of tasks. If this were occasional errors, that would be one thing. What makes this so demoralizing to me is that people will purposefully or routinely enter lowercase letters for inventory locations. it just shows how much they really care....
This is partially a rant and partially a duck. It's like that odd animal with a duck-bill and looks like a beaver... what was that again? oh yeah.. Dana Carvey.
Ok back to my rant.... as a software programmer, I get alot of UI questions. The most horrendous and annoying questions ever asked of me usually involve typing. For some reason, somewhere along the line, the idea of "typing" words into the computer became standardized somehow to include the following:
It might be that every person who works for my company types with two fingers. It might be the fact they have never heard that one can change a font size, shape, color, etc. Whatever the reason might be, it gives me great pain in my head region whenever I hear things like:
"Can you make it so everything I type is programmatically & automatically capitalized? Regardless of whether I have Caps Lock on or not?"
"Can I just get a list of all 1000+ options for our two-letter-defined location areas and just click the one I want rather than type it in?"
"Why do I have to enter the name of the person on one field and the product in another field? Can I just type them in all in one line and seperate them with a dash?"
and my ALL-TYME PERSONAL FAVRITE:
"Can I get a spell checker for that name field? Oh, and I want all the letters to be captialized all the time."
These, I will admit are not 'actual' quotes but rather summations of things I encounter... a lot. What prompted this entry was actually a request by someone to have an entry field for our inventory locations (Made up of one letter and one number, e.g. A1) converted automatically to uppercase despite the way it is entered. Now, I am all for this idea because of two things. One, if you enter it in lowercase, it is treated as a different location (bad design of some other brilliant programmer and not I). Two, it is generally a good thing to correct things you can easily find out are mistakes of the user. What really bites at me though... deep down inside... is the fact it is a SINGLE letter. Apparently, it IS too difficult for people to grasp that they need to hit the "shift" key when they enter that letter. Not intuitive from a design point-of-view, I understand that and that is why I will try and see if I can implement this. From an ethical point-of-view, I find this demoralizing that people cannot complete the simplist of tasks. If this were occasional errors, that would be one thing. What makes this so demoralizing to me is that people will purposefully or routinely enter lowercase letters for inventory locations. it just shows how much they really care....