willybfriendly - 5:57 pm on Sep 19, 2009 (gmt 0)

There are hundreds of times I've encountered this response. "When I do [this] it should do [that]." Well, I'm sorry. Computers are not human brains.

How true.

I regularly lecture clients on how "stupid" computers are. "They do exactly what you tell them to do, no more and no less. Good programmers create an illusion of intelligence, but a computer has exactly the same intelligence as a light switch - off or on."

However, those agencies don't have a usability expert....

A common problem in all kinds of programming - not just shopping carts. I will save for another time the story of a govt agency displaying a new application that autogenerated graphs in reports to an audience of about 300 end users, one of which interupted to ask, "Which is the green?" After a few minutes of confusion it was determined that no one had checked the pretty displays for color blindness (and that end user was color blind!). :o

I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars were burned on that mistake.