How alarming!

It's confession time. I'm an Apple Fanboy. I've got an iPhone. I've got an iPod Nano. I've got my own personal MacBook. And i've also inherited a MacBook Pro for work. I am an Apple Fanboy through and through. If I could justify the expense of an iPad, then I would.

So, given my love for their products, it takes a quite serious violation for me to be annoyed by any of my Apple products. It's usually my fault things go wrong, not theirs. But this morning, my iPhone did not awaken me at 7am with We Are Scientists' After Hours. This is the first time, ever, that my iPhone has not awoken me when expected. Slightly unusual as I have a repeated alarm set, for 7am every day Monday to Friday. So what went wrong?

Well, it starts with the fact that yesterday I took a trip to Newcastle on the train, with walking to the station and a huge delay I listened to music for almost 5 hours yesterday. I was quite bored on the train too, so I was played Bejeweled too. Fun fun fun. Anyways, I was quite heavy on my battery use yesterday. By the time I went to bed, I only had 3% of juice left. My late-night facebooking drained the last of the juice in my battery to nothing. The iPhone turned off. So, I plugged it into charge, turned over and went to sleep expecting that my repeating alarm would wake me up the next morning.

I already know that the phone has to be turned on for the alarm to work, but I expected that plugging my juice-empty phone into a power supply would power it back up and the alarm would go off as expected. My mental model of the situation was that plugging the phone in would turn it back on. I don't think that's unreasonable. But evidently it was wrong. My mental model was not supported, and my alarm didn't go off.

Now, actually, it was quite nice to have a lie in. So, in the words of a loyal twitter follower, my iPhone was actually sufficiently intuitive to know that I needed a lie in and gave me that option. Ah sweet iPhone, how could I ever doubt you?

Disclaimer: I wrote this post a long time ago, but for reasons that currently elude me I didn't post it.

HCI Fail #2 (part 2): Further Web Form Woes

So, following my post last night when I got frustrated with Barclays I am attempting to log in with my online banking from home - but this time, as I am at home, I have my trusty PINsentry card reader (which I didn't have on me yesterday) so I am hopeful that I might be able to get in using a different route.

I wasn't going to post about Barclays again, but this is just such a huge HCI fail that I couldn't resist. I entered my passcode without issue. Then, I was asked to select the 3rd character of my memorable word. Unfortunately, their fancy drop down box only has the letters a-f. This box is not scrollable. Neither can I type the letter I need.

Dropdown box failure.

Now, I suspect the reason this is failing is because I am using Safari on OSX Lion which has been known to cause scrolling issues. However, in my humble opinion a bank as big as Barclays should be able to develop sites that work on all modern browsers.

The good news, is that there is one final option for logging in that does not require my memorable word. So, I have now successfully logged into my account. Woohoo!

However, it has taken 3 attempts and much annoyance to get to this point. I am unimpressed.

I know this is a recent redesign for Barclays, but didn't they think about testing it with real users before it went live? Or perhaps employing a usability consultant to test it?

Barclays - you've had a few freebies from me, but if you would like me to test your site further, I am an HCI expert and my rates are pretty reasonable. Just saying.

HCI Fail #2: Unusual Characters

Those who know me, will know that my surname is double barrelled, and that I use a hyphen to join the two parts of my surname. This is my official, legal name. It's not particularly unusual to have a hyphenate surname, yet still many web forms consider it to be. So much so that their forms do no accept my name as a valid input.

Now, in the dawning age of the internet it was possibly forgivable if web forms could not handle "unusual" characters such as the hyphen (-) or the apostrophe ('), but now... it is not. And I get very frustrated when I receive input validation errors due to my hyphenated surname. So, I thought I would reinvigorate my blog by posting about input validation errors.

Let's name and shame those companies who should know better.

So, let's start with Barclays. I have banked with Barclays for a long time and have successfully used their internet banking in the past. Today however, I tried to log in but they have updated their pages and they need me to reenter some details that I had forgotten. So, I filled in their "forgotten details form".

It asked for my surname, I entered my surname and received this error message:

Error message. My surname isn't in the correct format.

So, that's pretty annoying. Thanks Barclays. Why is my legal surname not in the correct format?

It matches the name you have for me on my debit card. It also matches the name on my banks statements, and the name I used to enter to get me into your online banking.

So, although mildly frustrated, I tried again as I really needed to access my account. However, this time I entered my surname without the hypen, and I received the following:

Error message: The details I entered didn't match their records.

Well, yes. The details I've entered don't match your records, because when I entered details that do match their records they complained about the format of my name.

This is a fatal error of their system. It's very, very frustrating. I cannot complete my task. This means, I can no longer use their internet banking and will have to telephone them, at a cost to me. I'm not going to do this now. So I shall just have to go to the pub instead.

This actually happens to me on a semi-regular basis. So, now whenever it occurs I will name and shame the culprits. I encourage you to join me :-)