I'm sure I'm not alone in being aggravated by bad design in things like web forms. We've all had a time when we were faced with an annoying form or software that frankly refused to do what we needed it to do.

My current example is the otherwise lovely NextMD, which allows my doctor to send me e-mail of test results and the office to send me appointment reminders. Being me, I love this, because anything that gets me off the phone is A-OK in my book. It even has a function to allow you to request an appointment. This is great for those times when you remember at 11 pm that you really need to get that TB test done before Sept. 1 or whatever and I've used it a few times.

But here's the thing...it's set up thusly:

Preferred date/time: [dropdown of times] to [dropdown of times]
[checkboxes for Monday through Friday]
Alternate date/time: [dropdown of times] to [dropdown of times]
[checkboxes for Monday through Friday]

So...given checkboxes, am I supposed to only pick one day for preferred? Or can I pick multiple preferred days and multiple alternates? And what do I put for times? Do I give them the entire block of time I'm available? Or just my preferred appointment time? (That is, do I put 9:30-12 or 9:30-9:45?)

I'm sure less OCD people probably aren't bothered by this, but I am. The person who designed this system needed to have someone who hadn't worked on it actually try to use it. I guarantee you if they'd gotten a couple of non-programmers to poke at it for a few hours, someone would have asked them those questions and it would have been fixed! Asking people when they want to come in for an appointment isn't actually rocket science.

BTW, this came up because I decided last night to make an appointment to check out my left eye. I either have an infected tear duct or pinkeye. Neither prospect fills me with joy, may I say.

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Just had a quick phone meeting about the synagogue website with the programmers.

I'm a little concerned about their answer to my question about site structure. I wanted to make sure they could create subdirectories so that we would have a nice tidy navigation system. (The designer and I are calling for a top nav and two sub-levels of left nav menus.)

They said there weren't actually any subdirectories because "it's database driven" but they could add a widget so that we could tell the various menu levels what should appear there.

I'm not a programmer (obviously!) so does anybody know if that answer makes sense? Is there something I need to go back and ask them to make sure my lovely site map and Joelle's lovely design will actually work?

I'll close with the most amusing exchange...

Me: What kind of metadata will we be able to add to the pages?
Them: [pause] Uh...we've never had a shul that knew what metadata was.
Me: ::coughs:: Well, I'd really like to be able to access a description and keywords.
Them: But let's not make it mandatory. We don't want anyone who doesn't know what they're doing editing metadata.
Me: ABSOLUTELY.

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