Forms and Function

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Opinion

Forms and Function

6/14/2007

By Terry Calhoun

In life, we all encounter redundant, taxing, and seemingly purposeless forms. At your campus, do your forms serve a purpose? When you ask your users for information, is it information that you actually need? Actually use? Or are you wasting your users' time and needlessly causing frustration?

Where I live, Walmart has not succeeded in driving out the regional shopping chain, Mieijer. Mieijer has nearly succeeded in driving me out of its stores as a customer due to its placement of televisions hanging from the rafters in store aisles, and especially in checkout lanes, but that's another story. I hope. I hope it's not really giving the customers what they want. Sigh.

Anyway, quite some time ago Mieijer installed self-service checkout lanes in its stores. They were, ostensibly, for people in a hurry, but in fact they were a method of reducing the number of employees who get paychecks, also another story. These self-service checkouts permitted the use of a credit card, and, as part of the procedure for paying, a customer is told to use a plastic pen to sign inside a virtual signature box. I have yet to sign my real name.

When I was first asked to sign on one of those I had two immediate thoughts. The first was, "Do I want someone to have a digitized version of my signature?" That assumed, of course, that my signature was going to be recorded. I thought about that for a moment and realized that if my signature was going to be recorded, then in future trips the signature on file could be compared--by some computer algorithm--to previous signatures. That would be a security feature of note.

But I could not make myself accept that assumption. I sort of felt like our most security conscious prospective students who are handing over their Social Security numbers to a college or a university for a first time. It must happen. Some students must ask, "Do you really need this?"

Then I thought, "No, they aren't spending that much money on this." And I wondered for a moment why they were asking for this. It then occurred to me that they might, in fact, include this step both as a way of causing those committing fraud to hesitate and as a way of creating for others a perception that Mieijer had security for their credit way beyond expectations. Why should they care that I and others have angst about signing or that it slows down the process of checking out at what on the surface is intended to appear like a faster way of checking out?

So, I quickly signed the name, "George Washington," and that has been my credit card signature identity at Mieijer ever since. Lowe's, too, although sometimes with hesitation there because they print out a receipt with your signature and I always fear that the checkout clerk will notice what I wrote. No one has yet noticed, but I, as a consumer, am occasionally consumed by irritation that thousands of customers are every single day wasting their time with part of a process that does not appear to have any significant value to anyone.