To Dash or Not To Dash

If you’re a TiVo owner, the company will occasionally notify you of a new service or software upgrade available for your recorder. The TiVo folks, knowing that you may be very excited to get the new features, gives you a chance to sign up for the priority upgrade list, allowing you to be one of the first in your neighborhood to get the newest and greatest.

Signing up is straight forward. The only information you need is your TiVo Service Number:

What? You don’t have your number memorized? No problem. If you’re a TiVo Online User, the very same web site that is asking you for the number actually has it stored away for you to access:

All you need to do is write it down, go back to the type-in box, and type it back in. Or, if you’re a sophisticated, advanced, know-everything-about-the-web user, you can select the number, use the browser’s Copy function, and then paste it into the type-in field:

But wait, that doesn’t work. The damn dashes! To enter a valid number, you need to go back and remove them all:

There’s two things wrong here:

First, why not accept the number with dashes? How hard is it to write code to strip dashes or spaces out?

TiVo service numbers are not the only fields with this type of problem. Social security numbers, phone numbers, and credit card numbers all have dashes and spaces in the awkwardest of places. These are used as aids to help users remember their numbers and reduce mistakes.

Yet, in the place you most want to eliminate mistakes, the type-in field, we force users to eliminate these aids.

It’s always ironic to me when a site doesn’t accept data in the format it displays it in.

The second wrong thing is a bigger picture issue. The site already had the number. Why make the user type it in again? What value did that add?

This is a prime example of Tool Time. Tool Time is time a user spends futzing with a tool instead of getting their real work done. Tool time is something we try to eliminate. The time it takes to login, find the screen with the service number, copy it, return to the original field, paste it in, and remove the dashes, could all be eliminated with no reduction in the quality of the result. User wins. TiVo wins. Everybody wins.

Are you looking for places where tool time happens in your designs? Are you working to eliminate it?

[Gratuitous Plug: Christine & I will be talking about techniques to discover tool time in our upcoming UIE Roadshow, the first of which is taking place in Atlanta this week. A few seats still available for all six cities. More information is here.]