Couldn't you just scroll back with the left arrow key?

Posted by: Person Number B at October 6, 2004 12:26 AM

Actually, American Express credit cards only have fifteen digits, and Diners’ Club cards only fourteen, but this is still too long for the field. Maybe they tested it using a thirteen digit VISA card?

Posted by: Carey Evans at October 6, 2004 01:02 AM

What I'm wondering is how you ended up with "Internet Explorer Provided by Maxis, Inc." Maxis? As in "Sim City"?

Posted by: PlantPerson at October 6, 2004 09:38 AM

Um, Person Number 8, I think you miss the point here. Of course you can scroll back with the arrow key -- but you shouldn't have to, it's annoying, and there's no obvious reason why they needed to design the form that way, unless they're deliberately trying to make things difficult for their customers.

Something else I find annoying about web forms for credit card numbers: How come they never accept spaces? Obviously, you want to double-check that you entered the right number before submitting the info, and it would be so much easier if looked similar on the screen to the way it's printed on the card. It's a simple matter to take the input string and throw out all the nonnumeric info, so users could input the number with or without spaces, or with dashes, or however their whimsy strikes them.

Posted by: E.T. at October 6, 2004 10:34 AM

Not the wisest way to design the form, but it works and lets you get to the original goal, that is, paying your bill, so I think it's clumsy, but not necessarily broken....

Posted by: SAM at October 6, 2004 06:56 PM

It's clumsy but manages to work means it's not broken? I certainly hope you aren't a designer. Of course it's broken. There's no good reason for the input area to be too short other than poor design.

If each field of the form were on it's own separate page, it would be clumsy and still get the job done. But I'm sure most people would agree that it would be broken.

Posted by: Carlos Gomez at October 7, 2004 09:10 AM

I agree with the original poster. How hard is it to make the field 16 digits wide? Why even consider making it shorter? You need the space of 3 digits or what? It doesn't make any sense, it's clearly broken.

Posted by: Selcuk at October 7, 2004 11:44 AM

There's a larger "broken" issue with online credit card input pages in general.

Even though CGI scripts are readily available that can eliminate dashes and spaces where they occur (and even recognize what kind of card is being used by the field length), I have found only a handful of sites are not complete sticklers over the way users enter the data.

The most egregious are sites with special rude alerts that tell you how bad and wrong you are to have placed dashes or spaces in the credit card number field, and tell you to do it again.

All that punitive programming time would be much better spent on implementing simple parsers that can anticipate most human interpretations (a.k.a. "errors").

The irony is that such needless insensitivity appears on the very page where money actually gets handed over. I wonder how much that little bit of user dysfunctionality is costing online businesses...

Posted by: Alex Yourke at October 8, 2004 05:20 PM

I deal with Sprint PCS all the time as a reseller, and this pales in comparison to the dumb things they do on a daily basis. Just last week, I emailed my reps telling them (again) that they are morons and incompetent (yes, those words exactly). After my experiences with them, you should be lucky that it actually took the payment to begin with, though I absolutely agree that it would have taken the retard that programmed it 2 seconds to make the field 3 characters longer.

Posted by: Jay Bunner at October 10, 2004 11:44 AM

The problem here probably is the form designer was using a smaller font than you are. Unfortunately you can't specify an input box to be "16 characters wide".

Posted by: Loren Pechtel at October 10, 2004 12:30 PM

This screen shot is from 2003. The page in question doesn't look like this anymore, hasn't for some time and doesn't exhibit the problem in question.

Posted by: Jesse at October 11, 2004 10:42 AM

>

The person who sent this in must be an employee of Maxis, Inc. IE on my work PC says "Internet Explorer - Provided by ".

Posted by: Jay at October 12, 2004 11:07 AM

Loren, it certainly is possible to specify the that an input box be 16 characters wide using the "Char Width" or "size" tag. A silly oversight that should be fixed.

Posted by: Michael McWatters at October 12, 2004 03:15 PM

Loren, when you make forms like that, you actually CAN pick a font AND a font size. there is also an autosize property, that makes it as long as what you typed in it.

Posted by: who cares? at November 24, 2004 07:32 PM

"there is also an autosize property, that makes it as long as what you typed in it"

ummm...actually there isnt. Ylou have to set a a size="..." value or it will be the standard size set by your css or the viewers browser.

"Unfortunately you can't specify an input box to be "16 characters wide"

Yes, you can.

"Even though CGI scripts are readily available that can eliminate dashes and spaces where they occur (and even recognize what kind of card is being used by the field length), I have found only a handful of sites are not complete sticklers over the way users enter the data."

The reason programmers don't use these are because they are large, slow, and oftentimes ineffective. Most programmers use ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion MX...

If they did use those scripts, you would complain about how long it took for the next page to load.

Get a grip. It's not all that annoying to type in your credit card # without spaces or dashes. You know what? Cry about it. Please. You could spend 2 seconds to think about how to put in your credit card number, OR you could wait an extra 30 seconds, regardless of your connection, for a CGI script to run.

The fact is, you people are ignorant. You take no time to even try to understand the programmers point of view. They have a reason for doing everything.

I'm not saying they're infallible, I'm saying that there may be something you don't know about that prevents them from doing something.

Posted by: wow at February 20, 2005 08:08 PM