Posts tagged “forms”

Published

Every year the Brunei Darussalam Department of Labour releases a census that all local businesses must fill in. It’s a legal requirement and every year they don’t mind reminding you of the fines for neglecting to do so.

Well this year they’re trying something new: they’re doing it online via their newly released Labour Control System. I applaud the Department of Labour for taking real action in converting actual processes into an online workflow.

Like with any new system, there are bound to be bugs. And I found a rather embarrassing oversight. When asked for my country of origin, I could not select Brunei.

Under Country of Origin, Brunei was conspicuously missing

Erm, yeah. And I had to fill in a value or it wouldn’t allow me to proceed.

This wasn’t the only issue I cam across. Initially the system could not even retrieve my Company Registration Number and simply returned the value null.

Teething problems. It happens to the best of us. I hope the Department of Labour isn’t discouraged because bugs or not this is a step in the right direction!

Edit (19th October 2015): We now have a more complete list of countries which includes Brunei!

Published

A while back I made a post stressing the importance of providing users with all available options when offering a choice. A few days ago I was filling out an online form and was presented with these options:

A form asking "What is your gender?" giving 4 options: Female, Male, Transgendered and Other

That’s when it hit me that society (for the most part) has started to recognize gender identity beyond the usual Male or Female. It just blew my mind to think that such grand debates have finally come down to the everyday level of implementation. Trippy.

Published

OK, it seems we need to review Form User Interface 101: when providing users a choice of items, ensure the list is exhaustive.

Case in point: I was filling in the registration form for Brunei’s upcoming Century Run when I came to the field labelled Higher Education Institution. The choices were presented as a select menu. See if you can spot what’s wrong:

Select menu choices for higher education only lists Brunei institutions

The list only contains Brunei institutions of higher learning with no catch-all option for foreign universities. And since this was a required field I had to select something. So congratulations Universiti Brunei Darussalam, for the purposes of The Century Run I am unofficially an alumni! You lucky guys, you 🙂