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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure that this is a hall of shame for implementors, it is more of a hall of shame for users. The first web app I ever wrote did reporting on NMR machine usage; the users were scientists with advanced degrees and years of teaching (and computing) experience. The way you specified the date range for reports was via two text fields; the start date and the end date. Originally, I used a date parser that would accept pretty much any input. You could say "yesterday" to "today" or "4-2000" to "9-2005", etc. I listed examples in the description text, but I had several users ask me exactly what the date format could be. When I showed them "anything", they were amazed, but claimed it was confusing.

I changed the text to read "specify all dates in YYYYMMDD format, no spaces or slashes" and everyone loved it afterwards. I kept the intelligent parsing as an easter egg.

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Your users actually showed great foresight, I think. There are good reasons to avoid "intelligent" or hubristic interfaces: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram...

Summary: "intelligent" interfaces will always fail for trying to solve a problem (the Chinese room) which is un-decidable even for a human mind, and so the future will use dumb, reliable interfaces (until we can figure out telepathy). Corollary: users shouldn't be blamed for not wanting to trade reliability for "awesomeness". Read the article, it's worth it.

Why does he keep referring to himself as "your author here" or "the author"? Hiding the fact that you're referring to yourself doesn't make you not refer to yourself. It's just confusing - say "I" instead.

The author makes a good point, but how many ways are there to enter phone numbers/credit card numbers/dates? Can't these sites be a little flexible?

Hmm. Is "1-3-2010" January 3 or March 1?

Folks from different parts of the world disagree.

If a user enters that, the system could ask them which one they mean; optionally, it could even remember the user's preferences.

Since this was in the US, we went with the first one.

Yeah, I wouldn't assume all those companies' programmers are simply incompetent. For all I know it might be a business rule and the programmers are specifically asked to do that kind of validation. I'd rather ask some of those programmers before writing a web page about it.

It's the company's job to get this right, not any one programmer.

> the users were scientists with advanced degrees

They were expecting to have to retype the date, after the program rejected their first attempt. That's the way it usually goes ...

I did try to measure this. It seemed like most people were entering perfectly reasonable dates; even things like "March" and "November"

I have a feeling it's a case of not caring how to enter the date, and not caring to try a few and find out. Much easier if you're told exactly what to do, so you have to think, because apparently checking who used the NMR machines last week is not something people want to think about. (Fair enough.)

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