A Clever Solution in a Validation Message
The Dr. Pepper Go for More promotion is one of those marketing ploys where when you buy a product, you get a secret code you can enter at the Web site to see if you one deals. Man, I miss the old days where you could find out right away whether you won or not; instead, now we have to opt-in to lose, which seems like a lot of trouble to me and certainly doesn’t encourage me to purchase a product where I have a chance to win over one where I do not.
So I go over to the Web site after buying some Dr. Pepper and create an account. However, I exist in the database, so a validation message offers a unique convenience.
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You see, when you mouse over the text click here in the validation message, the application displays the name of the link on the page that you should click. Instead of, I don’t know, making the text a link.
As an added benefit, here’s the error page that displayed when I tried to actually submit the update profile form after clicking the appropriate link:
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I will leave it to your imagination, gentle reader, what might have triggered that failure. Was it:
- That I triggered the You didn’t type your new password/ Confirm Password doesn’t match password validation messages because I only wanted to update my address before I bent to the will of poor design that makes me type and retype my password to update my profile even after I logged in?
- That whomever developed the sweepstakes did not test existing functionality (such as the update profile) because it works with other programs?