On Jan 27, 2009, at 10:42 AM, Jake Trimble wrote:
The whitehouse.gov/contact page is completely coded wrong...period. I ran multiple tests on it such as going to the text area first and hitting enter/return and the navigating to a text field and hitting enter/return, the form then submitted without any validation of form elements. But when I went to a text field first and hit enter/return it gave me the validation errors. It is a simple coding error (asp.net form control) that can have huge negative impacts.
Upon looking at this specific form closer, it seems this was done purposefully. Given the message "Please limit your entry to 500 characters" directly below the only text area field in the form, one can assume whomever put the form together is probably attempting to discourage people from sending essays via the form, which would mean their looking to save bandwidth and not encourage long messages with multiple paragraphs.
Are they doing it properly? That can be debated and I'm not sure personally which way you'd solve the problem simply without a lot of messy coding. But as a design decision to force a limitation, I can understand it, even if I or others may not agree with it.
I have been working on government websites both internal and external for almost 8 years and while there is a huge push towards UX implementation into these applications, the transition is slow.
The team that worked on this site is probably the same team that created the Obama campaign site. Given the nature of the overall design approach, aesthetic and coding, this would seem to be so. That team is extremely competent and very much up to date with how all of this stuff works.
One word, "bureaucracy". Whether it's government employees tired of seeing their positions lost to contractors or contractors trying to keep their contracts, tall, thick walls have been erected and the result of which is filtered collaboration. Meaning that if I give you "AB" for example, you may only push through "A" and part of "B", while completing "B" on your own terms thus giving you worth as the process moves forward. It is my opinion that this will never change.
While this may or may not be true, I'm not sure it's applicable to this particular team or example.
The good news is that there are LOTS of people/companies working on the implementation of UX and other such methods into the government, but the "slow factor" is here to stay.
Given how FAST the whitehouse.gov site was turned around from the moment Obaba was elected and flipped to on the day Obama started (approx 2 months), I think its safe to say the team responsible for whitehouse.gov is not part of the problem.
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