The Telephone

brian hefele — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 19:46:38 +0200

I have applied for hundreds of jobs in the past few months. One thing that I have noticed is that (almost) all the web software related to job hunting and application feels ancient and clumsy in a web which generally tends toward either being clean, quick, and stable or flashy, but functional. The other prime example of this sort of 'old web' mentality is in forum software - somebody needs to step up and design the WordPress of forum software so that I don't feel like I'm hanging out on Geocities. Part of the problem with many of the job applications are their forms which simply don't provide good usability. A common application doesn't show the 'State' dropdown until you've chosen your country. This means that you can't tab from country to state, because state doesn't exist at the moment of tabbing. So you enter country, tab to ZIP (or something), shift-tab up to state, and then tab around a little more to get back in the game. Another common annoyance is the form that requires your phone number in a specific format.

This is a similar problem to that of not stripping punctuation from numbers, a task trivial for code to handle on the back end. Yet many websites still insist we don't hyphenate our credit card numbers, don't put any punctuation in our phone numbers, etc. No separators in a long string of digits is not the best as far as readability (and therefore entry) is concerned. The problem gets a little stranger when they instead force a specific method upon their users. Again, stripping the formatting and then reformatting it however you wish should be trivial to code, let the users enter it in a way that befits them. But, all this is just segue into my real point - the (301) 555-0505 format.

brian hefele's untidy space: semantics

The Telephone