One for the Google bots: Royal Mail OBA Online Business Account Guide - How To Delete or Cancel Orders and Templates.

OK, anyone who uses the Royal Mail Online Business Account tool to place orders for account mail, you may be a little confused. Well, I can’t help you too much, but here’s some tips, including how to delete open orders (not technically being able to, plus a poorly designed UI, dosen’t help).

You can skip the explanations, unless you have anything to do with OBA code, in which case - maybe take a class in HCI ;), and read the explanations.

Q. Product Search: Doesn’t bring anything up.

Explanation: Well, it does. But, getting technical, someone decided it was clever to perform an IS query instead of a LIKE, and without padding with wildcards or removing case formatting. So, unless you type in the full, exact, case correct (ie. ALL CAPS) name of a description or product (code), you won’t find owt. Not much of a “search” really.

A: Type in a star - “*” (without quotes) - in the Description box only. Change max results to as high as you want (it won’t return any results higher than this number if you have more than this number of services enabled). Hit search. And there’s all your currently activated products, contact sales if something’s missing.

Q: I saved an order, and didn’t confirm it. Now someone’s e-mailing me wanting me to confirm it…

Explanation: Provided with a “Cancel”, “Confirm”, “Save” button, users are probably likely to assume neither of them perform the function of either of the others. In OBA’s case, as you may have guessed, this isn’t entirely true. “Save” is more of a time delayed “Confirm”, allowing you to place an order but update it to a degree before confirming. You should then confirm it, otherwise someone from the accounts team will contact you asking to confirm the order so they can charge it. If you don’t want to confirm it, let them know it’s a test order and they’ll write it off their system.

A: Don’t save orders. If you need to, use an Order Template instead. Otherwise, ask RM to ignore the order (they can’t delete them either), and try to “cancel” it. See next Q.

Q: How do I cancel a saved Order / How do I cancel a row within an order without cancelling the whole thing?

Explanation: If you’re using a screen res less than 1280×1024, chances are the Search and History bars will cover up parts of an order table, including the Cancellation (dustbin icon) column. Actually, I’m having trouble replicating this with Orders and Templates, so it may only be an issue with Saved orders. And unfortunately, the order field doesn’t come with a horizontal scroll bar, so it took a call to tech support to figure out anything was there at all.
When they are used, they still don’t fulfil the role of cancelling an order (see above), but are the next best thing, and can also be used to cancel product rows if you can’t otherwise remove them.

A: Open an order for editing (History > Order > Change), then loose the History and / or Search bar (hit the little red arrow on the separating column to the edge of them). All order table columns should now be visible. Tick the box to the far right of a product row and then the Update button to cancel that row, or do it for all rows to “cancel” a saved, un-needed order.

Q: How do I delete a whole Order / Order Template?

Explanation: More UI sillyness. Providing a user with a Cancel button when creating an order / template, but then removing it from the saved version isn’t too clear. Hiding the delete button in the least likely place is even more HCI-nightmare.

A: For current, unsaved Orders or Templates, use the Cancel button at the bottom of the order screen.
For saved Orders, you can’t. See “How do I cancel…” above.
For Order Templates, open the Search column, search for the template (chance doc type to templates, date to before template was made). There, in the search results (of all places…), is the wonderful dustbin icon, universally signifying “hit me to delete”. At this point, you wouldn’t be surprised if it did the complete opposite like “Create 10 more copies of me”, but no, it does really delete that template. And is obviously handily disabled for regular orders.

Tune in next week for more “How the hell’d they figure that would work” Human Computer Interaction no-nos from the OBA User Interface design team. Or just some screen shots if you’re still confused ;o).

EDIT: Oh, look, HCI Display Design, Perceptual principles, thirteen of them. Guess what #1 is?

1. Make displays legible (or audible)

A display’s legibility is critical and necessary for designing a usable display. If the characters or objects being displayed cannot be discernible, then the operator cannot effectively make use of them.

EDIT 2: Why do I have to average weights myself? This is what compute-rs were invented for! I’m already inputting the total number of items, then weighting them all. Why can’t I just enter the total weight and it calculates average itself? Why must I take the extra step of dividing the total items by total weight, and inputting the average myself? Comeon, people -

$totalitems = $_GET['totalitems'];
$totalweight = $_GET['totalweight'];
$average = $totalweight / $totalitems;

There, you don’t even have to code it yourself (bar changing a few variables, or porting to a different language). And it’d save me 5 minutes a day. Just think of the man hours, the cost to businesses you’d save. Millions, Billions! Just one tiny code adjustment? Please?