IRCTC Calendar Design

IRCTC.co.in is the Indian Railways' ticketing website.

April has only 30 days. I still went ahead and selected 31st April and hit 'Find Trains'. Guess what happened next?

If you know April has only 30 days why would you add 31st to it? Better than designing accurate error messages, is preventing errors. IRCTC seemed to have missed that part.

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write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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30 Boxes decides how long my last name should be

Oh well. That means a good chunk of Indians can't use 30 Boxes. Big deal!

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write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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Which version is the latest?

Hey, maybe their versioning/numbering sequence is in an inverse sequence. But it is confusing to me Jack. Recommended Books on Usability
write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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Rediff Books: Spaced out?

So did I enter numeric data or not? I did, only, I inserted a space. If I am not wrong, the field does not allow spaces between numbers. The error message should read "Spaces not allowed." or something like that. But, this error situation should not occur in the first place. Why can't Rediff tell the user BEFORE the user enters data that spaces are not allowed? Better still display an example of the accepted format? I wanted to buy the latest Chetan Bhagat's book. But looks like I will shop else where for it. Recommended Books on Usability
write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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Happy to Help? Really?

Vodafone claims it is happy to help. Take a look. Click on the pictures to enlarge them. It is not enough if you deploy a CRM solution that's worth a zillion. How can you disable my account just because I didn't log in for 180 days? You send me your bills, and I pay them too; So, why should you disable my account doggy? Sometimes a little common sense goes a long way.

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What's in a last name?

If you try to download a white paper from http://www.comparecrm.com/ you need to fill a form (yawn!) before you can start the download (it fires the PDF on the fly and thus chokes my damned browser!); if you have initial(s) for a last name. God save you! The all-knowing designers of comparecrm.com think a last name has to have more than a single letter. What's the big deal? Read this!

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write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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Firefox VC++ Runtime Error

One more for the Hall of Shame! Recommended Books on Usability
write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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My STC India Annual Conference 2007 Slides

Contingency design does not figure much in conversations amongst technical communicators. In these conversations, the emphasis is usually on the almighty manual. However, oftentimes, customers read error messages before they even think of opening a product's manual. In this presentation, Suman Kumar introduces the key area of contingency design and answers questions like 'How do we design for contingencies?', 'Can you use error messages to boost customer experience and loyalty?', and 'How does effective contingency design help in reducing support costs?'

Find out: Contingency%20Design.zip (2.28 MB)

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write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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Length of the error message...

The length of the error message is directly proportional to the user's threat-perception. (Threat-perception = 'Something's wrong with this product') Does it make sense? Recommended Books on Usability
write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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I will be talking at the STC Annual Conference in Goa

Contingency design does not figure much in conversations amongst technical communicators. In these conversations, the emphasis is usually on the almighty manual. However, oftentimes, customers read error messages before they even think of opening a product's manual. In this presentation, Suman Kumar introduces the key area of contingency design and answers questions like 'How do we design for contingencies?', 'Can you use error messages to boost customer experience and loyalty?', and 'How does effective contingency design help in reducing support costs?'

Read more on the STC Website. Another interesting paper is by Rachna and Shilpa of Cadence: Test plans as a source of improving documentation quality. Sweet. Recommended Books on Usability
write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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Cricinfo.com: Pathetic Contigency Design

Cricinfo.com is probably the number 1 site for Cricket fans. Given the number of Cricket crazy fans in India and a huge Indian diaspora living all over the world, their traffic volumes must be huge. But that still doesn't stop me from complaining about how a production website can throw up these really elementary errors:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (11) in /usr/cricinfo/QUIZ/inc/inc_db.php on line 19 Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket= '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (11)

I got the above error message when I tried to access there new Cricket Quiz site. Yes, things breakdown, I know but shouldn't Cricinfo be throwing up a human readable, non-geeky message? Something like "Oops! Looks like our server is acting up again. We are very sorry about it. In the meantime why don't you check our abcd service, while we fix this bad, bad server?"
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write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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The Evil 404s

NDTV.com puked this at me:

An error occurred while processing your request. Reference #97.44ac7cb.1170673976.725f00a

Now, what the hell am I supposed to do? I can understand if a personal website crashes and pukes such garbled nonsense at me. Not NDTV. Haven't they heard of user friendly 404 pages? Recommended Books on Usability
write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

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