Phil Scott's WebLog

Yes, it's definitely funny, but only if you look at it from a developer's perspective. Take a step back and think about what this comment implies about the differences between you and your customer. Customers don't _care_ if it doesn't fit the technical spec or if it doesn't adhere to your strongly typed data model. They just know that when they hit 1-800-CALL-ATT on their phone it dials and gets them through. OK, I realise it's not a great example because the whole point of aliased numbers is not needing to store them in a PIM, but here's another example: in Internet Explorer I put "cars" in the address bar and hit enter. According to the spec for URL resolution that should fail because there's no peer named "cars" on my LAN. But as a user, that's probably not what I _meant_. I don't care what the RFC says, I just want websites about cars. So the application anticipates this and sends me to www.cars.com or a search page about cars. As a user I'm happy. My point is this: users don't think like you, they don't click like you and they don't use key combos like you. They adapt and traverse the interface to match their own mental models. So stay one step ahead, anticipate their _every_ move and let them store whatever the hell data makes them happy. But yes, it's still funny :-)

Sounds like pretty valid feedback.

Maybe you should accept alphanumerics but convert them to the numbers that are associated with. Very funny story. I old co-worker used to be the best at finding bugs in entry points of our system because he lived in a town called "Lee's Summit" with the ' in the name. He would break my sites in a minute. I miss that :).

^_^,Pretty Good!