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From: Chris Haun <chris@noskillz.com>
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To: Gregory Alan Bolcer <gbolcer@endeavors.com>
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Subject: Re: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station
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Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 12:21:17 -0400 (EDT)

I'll agree that webforms are a pain in the ass, however it would seem to 
me that the problem with passport is the same one you noted with the 
autoform function, providing more info than you want to.  That and some 
entity would be holding the passport info, thus have all that data in the 
first place.
Personally i'd never trust them not to at least use it internally to 
market to me, if not sell/rent out.  Just think of the ability 
they'd have to build a profile for you since everything you went to was 
tracked to you.  And thats just the marketing side of it.

Chris



On Sat, 28 Sep 2002, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote:

> What's wrong with doing business over the Web?  Web forms.  There's
> promising replacements forms, but this is the current state of the
> industry:
> 
>  o You find something that you want to fill out.  It's a partnership form,
>    a signup for a Web seminar, a request for more information, anything.
>  o You start wasting time typing in all those stupid fields and spend
>    about 10 minutes going through all their stupid qualification hoops
>    just to get a small piece of information , whitepaper, or a callback
>    when halfway through, you start to wonder if it's really worth your
>    time to forever be stuck on their stupid prospect list. 
>  o Pull down tags are never put in order of use instead of alphabetized.
>    I was on a site just now that had every single country in the world
>    listed; the selection of your country was absolutely critical for you
>    to hit submit, but due to the layout, the "more>" tag on the second
>    row was offscreen so it was impossible to select any country except
>    about two dozen third world countries. 
>  o Even worse, ever time you hit submit, all forms based things complain
>    about using the universal country phone number format and will cause
>    you to re-enter dashes instead of dots.
>  o When you get something that's not entered right, you will go back and
>    enter it right, but then some other field or most likely pulldown will
>    automatically get reset to the default value so that you will have to
>    go back and resent that freaking thing too.  Finally after all combinations
>    of all pulldowns, you may get a successful submit.
>  o You wait freaking forever just to get a confirmation.  
>  o Sometimes, like today, you won't be able to ever submit anything due
>    to it being impossible to ever submit a valid set of information that
>    is internally non-conflicting according to whatever fhead wrote their
>    forms submission.
> 
> What's wrong with this picture?  The company is screwing you by wasting
> your time enforcing their data collection standards on you.  I'm sure there's
> someone in that company that would be willing to accept "US", "U.S", "USA"
> "United States", "U of A", "America", etc. and would know exactly which
> freaking country the interested party was from instead of forcing them
> to waste even more time playing Web form geography.  
> 
> I'm starting to see the light of Passport.  You want more information?  Hit
> this passport button.  Voila.  IE6 and Netscape 6,7 have pre-forms sutff,
> but I always turn it off because you never know when there's that one field
> that you don't want to submit to the person you are submitting to that 
> automatically gets sent, i.e. the privacy stuff is well beyond the 
> average user who will get screwed on privacy stuff.  
> 
> So, if crappy forms-based submission is the state of practice for
> business enablement on the Web, I can't see this whole data submission
> and hurry up and wait for us to get back to you business process as
> working all that well.
> 
> 
> Greg
> 


