Warning. 100% pure rant.

I hate Internet applications. Actually I don't, but I hate applications which had been developed by people who don't care about usability at all. I have some examples:

* My online banking system. This is the trigger for today's post: I just entered a number of transactions which I wanted to batch-confirm as soon as I'm done with all of them. Suddenly the server stopped to react. Logging on two minutes later -> all data is gone. Why the heck don't they store their session-date in persistent memory and store a persistant cookie at my hard disk?

* Austria's largest real estate service: After finding an interesting object, you can send emails containing the relevant information. It does however not remember the following properties: sender's first name, sender's last name, sender's email address, recipient's first name, recipient's last name, recipient's email address. Why don't they even assign a temporary cookie here but instead force me to re-enter all this information for every note-to-self I want to send? Even more important, why don't they create a direct link to their objects? Instead, when reading the email you have to go to their homepage -> Search -> Advanced Search -> Houses (rent) to enter the object's ID contained in the email. Argh.

* Austria's railroad operator. You can buy and print your tickets online (which is fine). However, if you klick back once too often, they will internally create and bill two tickets. This happend to a co-worker of mine - the customer support department refused to refund the money. Why the heck don't they use a hidden form field and simply detect re-submit? Did they ever hear the word idempotency and know what it means? Also, you have to re-enter your payment and address information again and again. Why don't they assign a permanent cookie?

* A certain US Robotics ADSL router. Contrary to most other devices, this router only comes with an "embedded" web application to configure it. No means of telnetting to it. When something doesn't work, you can view a log which shows brilliant information along the lines of: "Dialing started .... Could not connect". Thanks very much. Why don't they at least include an advanced log which really shows what's going on? Note to USR: I returned your device because of this. I'm now running a unixish operating system for connection sharing again - I can now get as much log output as I want.

Finally (aka. "why did I post this rant?"): If you're developer of applications which are used inside a browser, please, please, please care for usability. Save my settings, don't make me re-enter anything. Also please, care about idempotency of web requests. If you're QA tester of one of these applications, please don't let them release it as long as these things aren't considered. Your customers will love you.

Thank you very much for your support. I'm looking forward to using your application!