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From: Gregory Alan Bolcer <gbolcer@endeavors.com>
Subject: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station
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Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 08:18:17 -0700

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


