Blog #8

Overall, I think that Wufoo did a pretty good job handling errors with it's form development website. I tried many different things, entering titles that didn't make sense, trying to create the form with missing fields, and adding multiple fields/labels inside another field or label. Wufoo kind of impressed me with how they handled these errors, and it even seemed that they took Hoekman's advice from Chapter 6. There error messages were understandable, i.e. when an error did occur and I did something wrong, the website's response was straight forward and to the point. I knew what I did wrong, and more important what needed to be changed to fix the issue.

Also, to help the users of the site, they give an example of a form and it's layout before you even start creating your own. This helps satisfy the poka-yoke device that Hoekman describes in the reading. Wufoo even gives confirmation messages when you want to delete a specific field (Hoekman may not necessarily agree with this functionality as it might insinuate that the site's users aren't sure of what they are doing). However, I believe that Wufoo has made a form-building tool that is easy-to-use and gives clear instruction to its users of how to handle creating their own form content, even handling errors effectively.

-Trenton Allen