Usability Fail - MyDocBill

Paying a medical bill online is becoming a common occurrence these days.  I came across one usability issue when trying to pay a bill through MyDocBill.com.  They ask for an account number, client ID, and date of birth.  The client ID is already filled in.  The account number field gives a watermark example of 123456, but clicking on the question mark next to the account number field gives a screenshot of an example bill, pointing to the area in the following screenshot:

Numbers, followed by a dash, followed by letters, all surrounded by a red rectangle.  In a box called "ACCOUNT NO."  Typing in what shows up in the bill results in a failure.  Just typing in the number part works. 

Interestingly enough, they use the same screenshot for the question mark next to the client ID field gives the exact same screenshot.  Recommendations: Just surround the number in the account number screenshot and the letters in the client ID screenshot.

Accessibility/Usability Fail: Hotel Checkbox Selection

While trying to get quotes for a hotel stay, this particular hotel site offered checkboxes for the room preferences. The only problem was that clicking on the checkbox itself would not set/unset the checkbox. Only clicking on the label for the checkbox worked. At least they had that working, but I've never seen clicking on the checkbox itself fail.

Mozilla's Popcorn Maker

Mozilla is working on Popcorn Maker, an editor that allows you to enhance video by adding things such as Google Maps, Twitter feeds, and more.

Mozilla Foundation COO Ryan Merkley gives a TED Talk with a quick demo of Popcorn Maker.

It looks like fun and I can imagine some good uses for this. I look forward to seeing it released in November 2012.

Why I'm Considering Dumping NoScript in Firefox

Don't get me wrong - I love the idea of NoScript.  Not having to run Javascript code I do not need to run a page, potentially making it faster, is a grand idea.  Plus, it potentially adds some security by not having every script run.

But NoScript has a problem.  It will block scripts but not show them in the NoScript menu for me to enable - and I need them for some pages to run.  I have verified this by running a similar add-on in Chromium (Chrome) which shows more scripts to unblock, which NoScript does not even show.  At this time, I have no desire to move to Chromium, mainly because I like having a menu bar, and it appears the only way to have one is to use Chrome on OS X, whose UI forces a menu bar at the top.

HTML5, the input element, the type attribute, and the date state

For the HTML5 input element, setting the type attribute to the date state forces any selected date to use the YYYY-MM-DD format, as determined by the W3C.  It also goes on to say that "The format shown to the user is independent of the format used for form submission. Browsers are encouraged to use user interfaces that present dates and times according to the conventions of the user's preferred locale."

I've only tested this with Opera, which has the date show up in the YYYY-MM-DD format.  I think this is disappointing from a usability standpoint.  I'm not thrilled about the idea of having to code for different date formats either.  I would love to see browser makers focus on implementing all HTML5 form features, particularly since forms are what really drive the Internet to be useful.  I would mind somehow seeing the pattern attribute have some standard values for regularly used types of data collected (zip codes, phone numbers, etc.) instead of having to create or find regular expressions and hope that you have covered all valid possibilities.

I do not heart iHeartRadio

Clear Channel is recently trying to go big with iHeartRadio as a competitor to Pandora. Sadly, usability issues prevent me from liking iHeartRadio.

iHeartRadio has some interesting ideas going for it - access to radio stations it owns and operates across the country and create your own custom station, based on an artist you give it, then it will customize the station based on how you rate songs, just like Pandora. It claims to have 11 million songs, much more than Pandora.

Sure enough, it has a non-mainstream artist I listen to and their newest albums. Their older albums were absent. Typing in the artist name was a challenge, though. After typing in a few characters, iHeartRadio searches for possible artists you are trying to type in. In doing so, however, the cursor goes back to the beginning. What you type will now be at the front. iHeartRadio needs to do this without changing the cursor focus.

Secondly, to create the custom station, you need to connect it to a Facebook profile and give it access to various things within Facebook. Not something I generally want to do, especially when just trying to test out something. I went along with it though to try it out, knowing I could remove it later.

I had no luck. It connected with Facebook, but I was left at the iHeartRadio site. No music. I tried creating a station again. A window quickly pops up again and closes.

I gave up after this. There shouldn't be this much difficulty to use a website, even just to demo it. Pandora is in no danger from iHeartRadio anytime soon.

AT&T Broadband to Impose Usage Caps

AT&T will impose a monthly 150 GB usage cap for DSL and a 250 GB cap for Uverse, according to dslreports.com. Overages will be $10 for every 50 GB over the cap. It will start on May 2.

And here I was pondering going with the Uverse service (I stopped DSL service with them years ago). I only hope my current ISP does not follow suit.

DNS Benchmark

Steve Gibson has come out with DNS Benchmark, a freeware application that tests your DNS server's speed and reliability, among other things, and compares them to 50 other DNS servers (though more are possible). It's written in assembly and thus has a small file size of 163.4 KB (for version 1.2.3925) and runs in Windows, but also runs in Wine on Linux and Macintosh. It takes a while to run and it is suggested that no other Internet activity occurs while it is running.

My ISP ended up being the fastest and not having any negatives for it, which is definitely nice to know.

AT&T Internet Service, Their Router, And Security

I helped someone out with setting up their modem/wireless router for AT&T after their old one got fried. The new one was by 2Wire. I was extremely disappointed to find that the wireless router uses WEP by default. In addition, AT&T does not make it obvious on changing this, nor do they make it obvious on how to connect to the router to change settings.

It was easy enough for me to find the IP address for the router, simply by looking at the status of the network connection in Windows and looking at the IP address for the gateway. Thankfully it was easy enough to get into and work with and see that they offer WPA2. Still, AT&T should force this to be the default, not WEP.

Ironically, someone from AT&T came by my house this evening to try to get me to buy into their U-verse product. As I got home later than expected and it was too cold outside for me to want have a long conversation with them, I held back from asking about compatibility with Linux, what wireless encryption their router uses by default, and going into how dangerous their DSL router default settings are. Aside from those arguments, I don't watch much television, and when I do, it usually ends up being British. There's also not enough of a speed and price difference for me to leave the local ISP I get my service from (which they never heard of, despite being the largest local ISP in the area). And switching ISPs feels like too much of a pain - like moving.

Is Your Router at Risk?

Apparently there will be a session at the Black Hat Conference this month entitled "How to Hack Millions of Routers". Forbes lists the routers that have been tested and goes into a little bit more detail about the hack. Notebooks.com talks about this story and offers tips for securing your router, but it should be noted that these are generic security measures and will not necessarily protect you from the hack.

Free jQuery Book

jQuery Fundamentals by Rebecca Murphey is available on-line for free.

Gentoo.org Blog Posts

Does gentoo.org really need to go crazy with posting as many as 35 blog posts over 17 days? I have no problem with the blog posts themselves, but when you have this many it gets a little difficult to look through each of the headlines and to tell which ones are even new. If they can't limit this to having separate "Blog posts" sections for each week, could they at least put a date added next to each headline?

Zumbox - The Paperless Postal System

Zumbox supposedly has an email address for every street address in the United States and is secure enough to meet PCI and HIPAA compliance.

An interesting concept, though I am a bit hesitant on using it for those purposes. While they may meet the same security standards as banks, I would rather not rely on one site for important mailings.

HTML Validator

HTML Validator is a Firefox add-on that lets you validate pages from within the browser. This is great if you don't want to have to rely on sending data to an external validator or if you need to validate pages on an Intranet. It's also great if you are working on web pages without a network connection.

Amazon MP3 Downloader

I was just recently forced to use Amazon's MP3 Downloader to get a full album. While at least they have a version for Linux, it is hard masked in Gentoo, so I had to break out my Kubuntu machine to finish everything. Even then, it did not work smoothly. Firefox seemed to get stuck in a rut, not acknowledging that the program was installed, so I had to go through Konqueror instead. Come on Amazon, you can do better than this.

Needs more cowbell

Yes, now you too can add more cowbell (and even some Christopher Walken) to your favorite song.

The Value of Informed Choice in Protecting Consumers, a Product, and a Company

The presentation brings up some good ideas that I would love to see incorporated by businesses. There should also be a way of taking pages of license agreements and making them into a few sentences for each important point while leaving the option to see the whole license agreement.

A site and a program for learning Hiragana and Katakana

I'm looking at the possibility of travelling to Japan next year, and because of that as well as my love of Japanese culture, I'm wanting to learn Japanese. My main focus is on learning to read and speak Japanese.

The difficult part of learning to read Japanese is the various character sets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Right now I am wanting to focus on learning Hiragana and Katakana and want to memorize each character. I have found a program and a site to help me with that.

The program is Kanatest and is for Linux. It will produce the character and you type in the Romaji equivalent for it.

The site is easyjapanese.org and it has quizzes for learning Hiragana and Katakana as well as a Kana Invaders game.

Do you know of a good site or program for learning Hiragana and Katakana? Please share them here!

TypePad Connect needs work

I tried enabling TypePad Connect on this blog, but it ends up breaking comments instead of improving them. Thank goodness I made a backup of the template.

Web Form Design - Filling in the Blanks review

Oct 26, 2008 by Steveproduct

Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

4 out of 5 stars

Luke Wroblewski's Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks is an excellent book for anyone that wants to make more usable forms or even increase the number of completions for the forms on your site, whether they be for sign ups or sales.

Luke looks at what should and should not be included on a form, placement of labels, error messages, and much more. Some of what he mentioned in the book I have heard before, but there was also a lot of new stuff that I had not heard of before.

I was a bit disappointed on his weak discussion of what input field types to use based on the possible answers. Instead, he points people in the direction of a six year old book that you will probably be hard pressed to find in a book store. At the very least I would have liked to see references to Web sites that discuss this topic, as I have seen at least one address this.

While it would have been beyond the scope of the book, I would have like to seen site references for the various inline errors and confirmations that he mentions in the book. Not just how to implement these, but how to implement these so they are Section 508 compliant.

This is definitely a must read book if you are creating forms for a Web site.