Your Web Site Just Dumped On Me

Here's the bane of my online experience. I'm filling in a long web form, then at the end have something go wrong and discover that all input is gone, dumped unceremoniously beyond retrieval. Organizations that show such little regard for their customers are soon replaced by friendlier sources.

We have been trying to register online for our cruise trip through the canal to the Caribbean to celebrate my better half's retirement. During 4 or 5 attempts so far, in each case, we get some message part way through saying the site is down temporarily, try later. We finally figure out that this message means we took too long to get to the next checkpoint in the process, and our session timed out. Then we get sent back to some world map from which we are supposed to navigate back to where we were, filling in some of the information again. We are doing more navigating than the ship's captain will do.

This is not an isolated case. It happens too frequently, and is beyond annoying when large amounts of text are 'disappeared'. My spouse just experienced this in one of her work systems. An hour of input lost. I consoled her by offering my solution (I could tell by her look I was a day late and a dollar short). But it's good advice: input a text submission into a text editor first, save it locally, then cut and paste it into the online form. Annoying, yes, but way better than the alternative.

Being from the software development industry, I may be more offended than most by the lack of understanding and attention to detail evident in too many web sites. Since a company's website is their public face, it seems they should recognize the self-interest aspect of getting it right. Making the user re-enter information is always a no-no. Capture the information field by field and use it to restore a session if something bad happens.