I recently used Ticketweb to buy tickets to see Editors at the Brixton Academy in October. Reaching the last part of the ugly online ordering form, the user is presented with this. Spot the deliberate mistake:

The last part of the form asks you to select a privacy option. The method used is flawed yet it’s very common:

You’re being asked a binary choice question, where the answer is either yes or no. These types of questions should use a checkbox, not the two radio buttons that are presented here. Radio buttons are mutually exclusive and should only be used when selecting something from a list of options. And when using radio buttons, you need to ensure that one option is pre-selected using the attribute checked="checked", which has been omitted here.

It constantly amazes me that basic mistakes like this are still being made in modern web development. It’s probably just ignorance on the part of the developer and is easily solved through education. I was going to email them about it but can’t find anywhere on their site to do so…

Over the weekend I tried to become a member of the British Film Institute by applying online.

It was pretty painless to complete the online form until I got to the payment screen. I entered my Maestro card details and clicked ‘Submit’ but the form failed. I was told to check that I had entered the Card Issue Number correctly. There was nothing wrong with it, so I tried the process again in Internet Explorer 7 in case there was some specific bug happening in FireFox, my regular browser. The same thing happened in IE7.

Frustrated, I spotted the note at the bottom of the page saying to call their Membership Helpline any time up until 10pm. This was on Sunday afternoon, so I rang and unsurprisingly was put through to voicemail that stated opening hours were “Ten until six, Monday to Friday”.

Today, I received a call back stating that they were having problems with Switch/Maestro cards on the site and that I should complete the membership over the phone. I was impressed to receive a reply: often you never hear back when leaving voicemails on customer service lines.

So I called the box office who said that they might not be able to complete the membership as all their credit/debit card machines were having problems! Some luck. In the event, they took my details and my card did in fact go through so in a few days I will receive my membership and lots of free gubbins.

Three things stand out here:

1. The web is great unless it goes wrong over the weekend
2. Ensure your customer contact information is correct
3. A disgruntled customer can be retained and delighted with a courteous personal call

I’m a new fan of the BFI. What a shame then that I can’t get tickets for Withnail 20 years on, one of the reasons i joined.

If you’ve played Tomb Raider Anniversary on the PC, you’ll know how frustrating it is to control, with Lara Croft variously performing as an hyperactive chipmunk on speed and an asthmatic three legged rhino with some heavy shopping.

This very funny video review sums it all up perfectly.

I recently went from zero blogs to two, more or less overnight. It appears I may have not thought things through clearly.

I currently have this blog and another at palemovie. The intention was to use palemovie as my personal blog and friskdesign as technology centric. Upon consideration this seems overkill (and it’s also a lot of work keeping both maintained). So I’ve decided to only use friskdesign and have migrated previous posts over from palemovie. If you’ve bookmarked palemovie, ditch it and use friskdesign instead.