Idiosyncrasies

Ever have a day just full of idiosyncrasies that it just drove you mad? Try having a few days of it! The bridge piece I have talked about in previous posts has had its’ fair share of these. In fact, today it just showed me one more that drives me insane.

Take this for example. Let’s say you want to collect a person’s name and possibility two people’s names. How would you do it? If it were me, I would have a text field for the first name, one for the middle initial, and another for the last name. Thus I know if their first name is two words, their last name is two words, or maybe it is just normal and its “John H. Doe”. Nonetheless, I would know which words correspond to each part of their name.

The software, of whose communication I am bridging does not do this! No, they have a single text field that is free form. So you could type “J Howard Doe” or “John H Doe” or “John Howard Van Nilsen” or “John Nilsen and Cindy Nilsen” and it would accept it. What I am supposed to do with this? Notice the last example! This is how they are supposed to enter two names… Am I just totally crazy or is this the weirdest UI you have ever heard of?

Now, I have done a fairly good job at figuring out the names, and it works probably 98% of the time, and can’t really account for the other 2% because of the crazy way the names were entered. Now, the biggest idiosyncrasy of this whole ordeal, is there is another part of the UI that has a ‘name’ entry too. You would think the software would handle that ‘name’ entry the same as the first part of the UI. BUT YOU WOULD BE WRONG! No, it handles it entirely differently and just throws my world in a whirlwind as I try to figure out what to do with this data. For example, if the user entered in “J Howard Doe” on the first screen and “J Howard Doe” on the second, my piece receives the following: Data from First Screen: “J Howard Doe”, Data from Second Screen: “J H Doe”. WTF!! Why the hell was it handled differently?

Welcome to my week.