Category Archives: thoughts

Choose your own language

internet, thoughts, , ,

One of my favourite sites is AirBnB. I like the concept, I like their design and I have used it to book accommodation for almost all of our trips while we have been in Europe. Sometimes the site switches to German from my profile selection of English which is a minor pain but it also brought home an interesting function of the website: the language picker.

On AirBnB, the language dropdown (or, dropup, actually) uses native language names or characters and the only icon is a globe on the actual dropdown. This struck me as interesting given the emphasis on colour throughout the rest of the site. This function felt a little boring and I wondered why they don’t use flags as I have seen elsewhere. Continue reading Choose your own language →

Train travel

thoughts, travel, ,

Last week my reserved train seat was in the little compartment at the front of the train just behind the driver. This meant my fellow passengers (about a dozen of us) had a terrific view of the train simply eating up the distance as the sun rose.

I have never before sat in one of these seats so I really enjoyed it. I don’t think it was a particularly fast piece of track although it was fast enough that sometimes things would whizz past in the middle distance before you had worked out if it was a shed or a cow. I especially enjoyed floating past the traffic on the autobahn situated alongside us: I found myself feeling extremely smug about that!

Still, I do find myself caught up in the opportunities for train travel in Europe. While my initial expectations were perhaps a little romantic and tinged with the drama of too many Agatha Christie novels as a child, I still find them endlessly convenient and valuable.

Continue reading Train travel →

Don’t forget the Germans!

internet, thoughts, ,

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!

internet, thoughts, ,

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.