David's World

December 1, 2006

Computer gibberish #1

When dealing with an internet domain name registration today, the website of UK-based internet registry Nominet greeted me with this informational message:

You cannot change the legal registrant for a domain using this systems, that needs a registrant transfer.

Do you understand it? I don't. At least unless I try really hard.

It's a fantastic example of how some programmer got not only the spelling ("this systems"), punctuation ("," instead of "."), but also wrote this without his audience in mind. What's a "registrant transfer", and why is it different from changing the legal registrant?

I know what they really mean - but why on earth do they expect a random visitor to understand this computer-gibberish?

I quoted this in an e-mail to the Nominet support, asking them if anyone speaks English in their company. A Michael L got back to me: "Please could you confirm the domain name, the Nominet service you were using and what you were trying to amend and I will be able to advise further."
I don't think he got the point.

I've created a new category in this blog - entertaining you readers with occasional findings. It's not so much the occasional spelling mistake that drives me crazy. It's the fact that people don't think about who is supposed to read things. And that's what I'd like to point out occasionally. Feel free to correct my English.

I'm sure we changed this a few weeks ago, but anyway if the page you are referring to is http://www.nominet.org.uk/registrants/maintain/changedetails/online/ then we have changed it now.

Lots of people make spelling or grammatical errors, I'm surprised you should comment on that. But the lack of a link to 'registrant transfer' I agree was a mistake, but that has been corrected.

But I also don't agree with the general point that this is a difficult sentence to understand, despite the faults. It clearly says you can't do something here you have to go there. Pretty straightforward really.

I've just checked and we only changed the copy a few days ago. But the sentence above did have 'registrant transfer' as a link, which you haven't shown.

You're right - the link definitely helps, and the new text is much better.

Still, having just logged in to the system, I haven't had a chance to tell it to transfer the domain - yet it greets me with information about what I cannot do with the "Registrants Online" system. Only at the bottom of the page do I find such information - after the link to the system. Bad spelling and grammar don't contribute anywhere near as much to the confusion as does the order in which information is presented.

It seems that "Registrants Online" is only meant to confirm somebody's details from a letter they received in the mail. Why would that little application then be called "Registrants Online" rather than "confirm your address", or something like that?

You're inventing proprietary terminology such as "Registrants Online" with no need! Why use compound nouns such as "registrant transfer", when you can have a linked text such as "change the legal registrant for a domain"? Linking those terms to the appropriate pages is quite helpful, avoiding them would be best.

A second look at the site reveals four levels in the hierarchy of menus (down to the page discussed). The path inside that hierarchy is shown between levels 2 and 3. When I click on "Registrants Online", I get another level (new design!) and after logging in, another one opens in a new window. Oh my!

Anyways, avoiding spelling mistakes and designing websites that are easy to navigate won't save the world. These things interest me only because they allow us to form an intuition as to why something may be difficult to understand.

Sup!

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