Being user-friendly

I spend more than the usual amount of time on the web. I post content on a series of regional portals, on several blogs, and for a host of web clients who have hired me. I’ve been doing web work since 1996, back in the day when we still coded in notepad. I love the ways the web has developed into a multimedia platform where my clients can make audio and video available in addition to text.

Now you can have your web content posted in seconds instead of hours, and it can be changed at a moment’s notice. I really like most of the innovations that have happened in the last decade to make the web (and computers in general) so user-friendly. But somebody needs to clue in the geeks who do the coding on those innovations.

Because of hackers and scripts, it became necessary to have a system that could validate that forms are being completed by actual human beings (instead of automated scripts). So someone devised this image validation system that would display letters and numbers as an image that would have to be typed into a text box to sort of prove you’re a person and not a machine.  I get that, and I don’t object to that system.  But who on God’s green earth decided that the images need to be so distorted that you can’t READ the characters to type them in??

Tonight I was uninstalling some software I tried out.  The uninstall process asked me to complete a form telling them why I removed their software. No problem! I completed the form and then came the validation. The image was absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to decipher. I tried three different times and each of the images displayed a skewed image of a set of numbers….only the TOP half of the numbers.  Utterly frustrating. Guess they don’t really WANT our feedback, huh?