More often than I'd like I encounter a bit of the internet that either isn't clear, isn't useful, or isn't working properly. Occasionally I get frustrated enough to write about it.
Here's a very quick one to complain about my apparent need to be clairvoyant when submitting forms.
I'll keep this brief. Opening an ISA online, quite a complex thing, should be handled carefully. And to be fair, Virgin Money's website didn't seem too bad to start with - the forms were reasonably clear and well laid out, nothing obviously confusing or misleading. But then I got to the part where I had to choose a password. I used my browser's built in 'create hard to guess password' feature, tried to continue, and got this.
It didn't like my password. I didn't know why, but fortunately there was a handy popup to show what was wrong. It was even dynamically updated - I tried removing the numbers and that particular item suddenly turned red, indicating that I had no numbers in my password.
It took me a while to figure it out, but the problem wasn't that I was missing something it wanted, it was that I had something it didn't like. Specifically, my password candidate contained the ~ character. What a shame that such thought had obviously gone into this password checker, but they'd overlooked one key aspect, leaving it almost totally bewildering.
Here's another one I found annoying on the next page. Can you guess which fields are required?
Bit of a spoiler in the screenshot obviously. Yes, it's gender. But when I first came to that page, none of the fields were marked with an asterisk (as you'll note the password fields were) to indicate that they were required. A small thing, but again quite annoying.
One more - and a lot of companies still have this problem, even today - the next form asked for details of my employer and job type, but didn't list mine in the available options. I'm a frontend web developer, working for a technology organisation, but were there any options that even came close to that? No, there were not. If I'd worked in the adult entertainment industry I'd have had no problem, but I guess they've been around longer.
One more thing
The other part of this process that I didn't capture a screenshot of was the section on personal details, where part way down the page I was asked for my address. I chose the 'lookup address' option, typed in my postcode and hit a button beneath the field. The form then reloaded with a select element containing a series of addresses. I selected the right one, worked my way through the rest of the form and hit submit.
But there was a problem - in order to tell them my address I not only had to select the right option from the select element, but I also had to press the submit button that accompanied it, which I had overlooked. This is a small but very weird thing - forms should not have more than one submit button. I filled out my details correctly, but still I had to press two buttons to submit the form. For a moment, I was very confused.
There's probably a complex technical reason why the form was built this way, but that's no excuse.