I got an email from the unemployment office asking me to fill out a survey about their website.
This I did. The usual boring questions about usability, just for me to rate 1-5 which was good or bad. Did you notice the errors there? Uneven numbers give you the possibility to rate at the mid-most number… I did a double-take when I saw it. But, then again, the survey is created with a user tool probably by people in the office in question.
Anyway: the last question was “Do you have any other comments on the website?” and included a textarea in which to spew forth my critique. And did I? Nine paragraphs of UI bugs, all of which I found by just logging on to the site.
Basically, the site reeks. So 90s. Frames, no handling of the plural form, scripting to do what CSS does best, and so forth. I could live with it being old, and “works in both Netscape 4.73 and IE5.0”, but there were outright errors on many pages.
All would be well in IT-land if this was a site done “back then”, but some parts of the website are created using ASP.NET, so it can’t be that old. I hope they didn’t pay too much tax money for it. *Gripe, gripe.*
I also remarked on the lack of standards when it comes to code commenting. Comment in English, people. Makes code accessible to the next person who is going down in the trenches.