Category Archives: internet

Don’t forget the Germans!

My post about a project that forgot the French reminded me of a similar – but not so serious – issue that has happened a few times since moving to Germany. We updated our address with various institutions once we had found a permanent residence on Cologne: bank, insurance, etc.

It’s a small difference, but Germany has a different format for addresses. Instead of ## Street, they use the format Street ## (why is it formatted differently?? Good question! I wish I knew…). Continue reading Don’t forget the Germans!

Don’t forget the French!

I still regularly think about a project that I worked on where we – without even realising it! – completely excluded a huge portion of our potential users. The project was a reasonably complicated registration and payment gateway for an online product: users purchased an account to use the website.

After launching a version of the project in Canada, we began receiving emails about problems with the registration almost immediately and could not work out what was causing the problem. The users were doing everything right and then the application would simply stall at the payment section and refuse to proceed with the transaction. We checked all the fields to submit the transaction and couldn’t find any errors from our side at all. We tried using false postcodes or incorrectly formatted Canadian phone numbers and found that the system was able to return a helpful validation error each time.

What was the problem? Why were so many potential users stalling within the process? Why were we getting so many angry emails in French?? Céline and François were emailing us, but John and Anna were not. Was our application form discriminating against French Canadians?!

I tried putting through a transaction for one of our emailers using only dummy credit details and it all worked. So, it wasn’t the payment that was stalling it. What was it?
Then I saw that I had anglicised the name. Celine instead of Céline. Add the accent back in and… failed transaction. So, our application would not accept an acute. Or a grave,  a circumflex or a cedilla.

It turned out to be a simple developer fix to upgrade the application to accept foreign characters, but it taught me a valuable lesson: don’t forget the French.

Visit Copenhagen

The Copenhagen tourist website is probably the best example I’ve seen of a city promoting itself really well. Amsterdam has a pretty good one too, but too busy and lacking the clear voice of the Danish capital’s. I especially like the way that visit copenhagen includes streams of external content from instagram or twitter without losing their focus.
My other impression is of authenticity. Obviously, I realise that I am being sold something (Copenhagen), but it doesn’t feel outlandish or pushy. All the attractions or destinations are lovingly described in a way that actually lets me choose whether it fits what I want to do or see. For example:
“Have you met Aksel, Marko, Marcon, Ludvig, Bo and Louise? Experience Visit Carlsbergs impressive brewery horses close up in the stables, the forge or harnessed to the big beerwagons. See them have horseshoes put on and hop aboard the wagons for a tour around the old Carlsberg area.”
Not my thing for this weekend, but I can see how that could appeal to others. When I was a kid I would have been right up for it, without a doubt.
On the other hand: Continue reading Visit Copenhagen