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Opinion
Stupid Forms and Other Communications
8/3/2006
By Terry Calhoun
You may guess from the title this week that I am annoyed with something. That would be correct. A few weeks ago, my wife received an invoice for $167.52 for a package that was shipped from Florida to some overseas company via her FedEx account.
Unfortunately for FedEx, she d'esn’t have a FedEx account. She never has.
We took the invoice and carefully wrote out in bold ink that this was not her account, that she had not opened an account with FedEx ever, and that we expected FedEx to take care of the situation without further bothering us. Then we mailed it back to FedEx.
Yesterday we received a “response” to our “query” that consisted of a single sheet of paper, with very tiny places to complete bits of information like “Invoice Number,” “Shipped To,” “Shipped From,” “Nature of Query,” and so forth.
I’m afraid that I went ballistic. Partly because it was about 100 degrees on the “realfeel” meter, but partly because I have a short trigger regarding (a) poorly designed forms and (b) large, complicated companies that do their best to ensure that a consumer spends far more time dealing with an issue than the company itself has to.
This was a classic example of both.
As a form to collect data to respond to (click here for PDF of form), it was terribly designed. Some of the information we were asked for could possibly fit into a single, single-spaced, underlined spot about 2 inches wide. (I recommend that you open the PDF of the form and have it for reference while you read.)
For example, I could have fit the “Invoice Number” into such a space. But since I had sent back the invoice with my query written on it, I no longer had the invoice for the non-existent FedEx account, and could not provide that information.
Which I guess was OK because that information – the “Invoice Number” – was printed on the form about 1.5 inches below the space where I was being asked to provide it to FedEx.
Really, it just gets worse.
What’s this got to do with higher education and IT? Well, higher education has its own wealth of poorly designed forms and communications, and those forms and communications weave in and around and beneath the data collection and massaging that IT folks design and maintain.
Two of the reasons behind poorly designed forms, as I am sure most readers know, are (a) forms and communications designed by the geeks who happened to write the software and (b) forms and communications designed by someone who d'esn’t understand the software and the data involved.
Writing this week’s column, I have begun to wonder about a different category of poorly designed forms and communications. This is, “forms and documents intentionally designed to seem to be poorly designed.”
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