Friday, April 13, 2007

A bad place


My trip is invalid.
What a nasty word.
I wanted to find out whether and how I could take a bus to the airport to begin my trip to the Holocaust Museum with my aged mother and teenage son, as part of a class assignment. I know I'm a mile away from the nearest bus stop, and I'd save on parking fees at the airport. A neighbor would likely be able to give us a ride with our luggage to the nearest stop.
I have no idea what the address of the airport is. Who does?
I have no time to click on extra links. Who does?
So I try a quick Internet search, but I'm told I'm invalid.
People designing interactive forms long for the ability to force Internet users to input all the correct information. I recently sat in on a meeting where we envisioned collecting news data from the public. One person suggested that it would be very cool and efficient to use the required fields function to force users to give us all the information we need. Media folks spend hours tracking down a missing fact or two (or three), and the forms would help us force others to gather all necessary information.
Cool idea. Just don't call me invalid.
Site Lacks Heroin Content, Vince Flanders would say. While I care about cutting down on carbon emissions and the money I spend on gas and parking, I don't care enough to get through being called invalid. Call me names, and I won't trust your site.
In our meeting, one smart person said folks go to the Internet to be validated. That's why they seek out opinions and thoughts similar to their own. They don't want to be invalidated.
And I don't need all the clutter of a big giant help file, as my next click.
So instead, I'm giving up on a bus. We'll just pay the parking fees for our trip.

1 comment:

gercohenJoMC712 said...

when my son started at UNC-Charlotte he did not have a car, and we tried to use the Charlotte CATS bus website to plan a trip, it was just as useless then. If us college educated types can't figure it out, how about the great mass of bus users, a large proportion of whom are at the low end of the internet user curve.