I’m working on payment patterns for Rebtel, which is quite complex what with their service being available in more than 40 countries. One payment service provider for credit cards is Bibit, and right now their hosted checkout page is used. A minute ago, I was testing the current interaction to find room for improvement (there’s lots of room). I submit the payment form to see what happens. Now I’m privately amused and publicly horrified.

One of the address fields is missing, or contains illegal data

Fail.

Did I accidentally add a scene release screener of Quantum of Solace to one of the fields?

Of course not. Bibit, being a technologically driven company, has left the error feedback in the hands of an overworked programmer, who in his infinite smartness (and being an excellent driver in general) decided that this message was outstanding in its correctness, since it covers many eventualities and uses powerful language. In nerd lingo illegal just means ”not the way my code wants it”. Last, but not least, it nicely reflects his internal favorite validation regular expression IllegalDataRe.

Now, I understand what is actually meant, and most other people will too, after a second or two of thinking. But even then there is a problem with the message, because it’s too generic and actually doesn’t tell us what’s wrong.

The big issue here is that Bibit didn’t care. They process millions of payments every day but they’re too lazy to construct their single most important interface in a proper way. The example above is just one of a dozen things wrong with its interaction.  It’s not badly designed, it’s not designed at all.

I can’t help but wonder what effect this negligence has on their customers’ bottom line. At any rate, I’m happier now than I was a minute ago because at least I got to rant and have a laugh about it :). What’s your favorite bad checkout or input validation?