Disaster relief, brought to you by United Way and ColdFusion 8

Brian Dillard, Friday, October 5, 2007 @ 9:40 am

My earlier post about the Adobe MAX developer conference left out one of the most interesting sessions: the keynote, which was presented with no small amount of sound and fury. The segment devoted to ColdFusion 8 proved particularly fascinating. Scott Fegette and Ben Forta appeared on stage to talk about their week-long effort to modernize the United Way's volunteer website. Adobe offered their services in this regard as a way to give back to the community and, coincidentally, highlight the power of ColdFusion 8. I applaud this act of volunteerism on behalf of volunteerism, but I can't say I'm in love with the results.

The old site included a fairly long, scrolling demographic survey that was used to collect information about volunteers. It contained a mixture of required and optional fields. The form itself could definitely have used some interface improvements; I'd love to see what somebody like Luke Wroblewski could have done with it. But I was a little shocked at what Fegette and Forta did: They simply wrapped it in an accordion widget and called it a day. You can see the results here.

Sure, there's now some cool behind-the-scenes code that compiles a custom PDF of volunteer resources based on your answers to the survey. But the form itself has gone from an interface that's low-tech but usable - everyone knows how to scroll down a page till they find a submit button - to one that's both up-to-the-minute and confusing. By wrapping all of the optional questions in a separate section of the accordion, the designers have pretty much guaranteed that nobody's going to fill them out. They interface concedes as much when it implores users with this instructional text: "Please continue to section 2 of the survey below." If you have to explain how your interface works, you've probably under- or over-designed.

To make matters worse, there's practically no validation on the client or server side. Here's the code to  validate the presence of a ZIP Code:

<script language="javascript">
function checkForm(){
    var zip = document.more.zip.value;
    if (zip ==''){
                alert("Please enter your Zip Code.");
                //after alert popup, send focus back to firstname field
                document.more.zip.focus();
                return false;
        }
    return true
}
</script>

Of course, considering the ZIP field inexplicably defaults to "0," checking for a blank field doesn't really help much. You can provide a ZIP Code of "0" and an answer to exactly one of the questions on the survey and still receive your customized set of PDFs. That left me to wonder just how much customization is actually provided.

I applaud Adobe, Fegette and Forta for their charity, so I won't detail any more bugs, design flaws or lapses in standards. (Other folks have already taken up that cause.) I will, however, pose this question: Why would one of the leading software companies in the world, known for its stunning visual tools and eager to gain market share as a platform for serious software development, choose to demo something in front of 4,000 conference attendees without ensuring that it adheres to rigorous technical, aesthetic and usability standards?

agile ajax

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