Web site legal and usability problems

My eldest is in college, and today she asked me to purchase an online textbook from cengagebrain.com. There were several interesting things about this site...

1. At the bottom of the purchasing page there was a link to their terms and conditions - all 8188 words of it! That works out to 260 words per dollar spent. Can you believe it - having to study an 8188 word purchase contract before you buy a digital textbook? Something is not quite right here, especially when the first assignment was due at midnight tomorrow.
2. The last term on the contract stated that they had the right to deny you access to your account at their sole discretion for any reason what so ever. Wow - so I am paying for this access, and if they are in a bad mood tomorrow, they can just turn off my access. I have no recourse at all.
3. Paying for the text book required my credit cards. When entering the credit card number I had to take care to strip out all spaces and dashes - enter numbers only. This is a pet usability peeve of mine - it doesn't take much JavaScript to strip those things out, but no, you the user, must do the work. But if you type one of those 16 digits incorrectly and there are no spaces in the 16 numbers, it can be difficult to find the error. I am never sure if this is just poor UI design, or lazy programmers, but you so often see it on web sites. My rule of thumb is that if the system can do the work, the then user should not have to do it.
4. The credit card expiry date month defaulted to August, but my expiry month for this card is earlier in the year. So when I changed the month I got an error, because the expiry date was now earlier than today (I had not yet set the year field). But the year field is to the right of the month field; naturally you enter the month first. This is an example of poor web site design, but something that can so easily slip past the people developing the web site, and their quality department. These sort of things really take away for the "quality" of the user experience.

It was quite interesting to come up with so many problems with so little interaction on a web site. This is a good example of why work flow, web site & software development really are so hard to get right.

A little on Evernote indexing from images

I have been using Evernote since about March '09, and have found it to work well (4499 notes as of today). I have always known they analyze images and extract the text in the background to index it, but never had occasion to make use of that until yesterday.

While searching for a particular person's name, I saw that Evernote found it on a screen shot that had been pasted into a note. Now that was impressive, because it was an image of the name; there was no actual text there. Evernote recognized the text and indexed it; in fact the text was even highlighted in the image when I searched for the name.

I also use Evernote to store images of all the business cards I get, rather than leaving the cards in a pile in a drawer. Along with the image of the card I usually a few words about the person and why I have their business card. Now I know that Evernote can find all those names in the business cards. Taking the idea a bit further, if you take a photo of a meeting room whiteboard, Evenote will analyze and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the text, and then index it.

All of this takes Evernote's usefulness up a notch!

Blog move

For some months technical problems have prevented me from posting on my blog; and a lack of time prevented me from fixing them. I have been thinking of using a SaaS (Software as a Service) approach for hosting this blog for quite a while, and these problems pushed me over the edge. After looking at the possibilities available, Google seemed an excellent choice.

I must say I have been very pleasantly surprised by how well Google's Blogger just works.  One example is "After the jump summaries". This is a feature which allows you to create expandable post summaries in your blog posts, so longer posts appear as an intro with a link to "Read More".

There are a few formatting issues that I need to resolve, but that will come later.Once all the articles are moved, I will point the blog's URL over here. The articles will keep their original dates, and if possible I will try to keep the original URLs. Unfortunately the comments probably won't make it across. Once the blog is in its new home it should be significantly easier to maintain, which means I should add articles more regularly again.