Please start again

By Darren Baguley
September 3, 2005
Time-outs and processing errors that
cause freezes create a lot of frustration. Photo: Phil Carrick

Time-outs and processing errors that cause freezes create a lot of frustration. Photo: Phil Carrick

It can drive you nuts. You're filling out a survey, doing your tax return or applying for a credit card when the screen freezes, nothing you do can get it working again and you have to start all over.

You're not alone. According to a recent web survey by Adobe Systems and Nielsen NetRatings, electronic form (e-form) crashes and time-outs are a big bugbear for Australians.

Of those surveyed, 88 per cent griped about slow page loading, while 76 per cent were frustrated at the inability to go back to fix a mistake or change a value. Other gripes were time-outs (71 per cent) and document crashes (61 per cent).

The managing director of the research company Telsyte, Shara Evans, says poor form design and under-provisioned web servers often cause these sorts of problems. "Even with broadband connections web servers can be congested and you can still get time-outs. On forms that go across multiple pages sometimes you'll get three of four pages in and some sort of processing error comes up, maybe on the host site wherever the form is, and you can't get back to where you were," Evans says.

Despite these frustrations, the research suggests more people are choosing to fill in online forms such as credit card applications, tax returns and surveys. However, the results are likely to be skewed because the survey was conducted online.

Nevertheless, of the 583 people surveyed, 78 per cent said they used the internet daily while 98 per cent said they used it once a week. When it came to filling in forms, 82 per cent said they preferred using online forms to paper and 80 per cent of the sample believed they would use online forms more often if they could save the form and complete it offline at their leisure.

The advantages to increasing use of e-forms are considerable, says Adobe Systems's senior Asia-Pacific marketing manager, Mark Phibbs. These include reduced mistakes from keying data off paper forms, productivity gains for companies not having to handle paper forms and the environmental benefits of using less paper.

Despite these incentives there are some important factors inhibiting take up of the technology. Evans says a bad first experience can put off a lot of people who go back to using paper. "Time-outs and processing errors that cause freezes and force the user to start at the beginning again cause a lot of frustration."

Government and private organisations are starting to use digital signatures to authenticate electronic documents, but most business-to-consumer transactions need a signature to be legally binding, which means at some point documents will need to be printed.

A vice-president at research company Gartner, Richard Harris, says authentication is an important issue. "Contracts and other legal documents must be evidenced by the physical signature. That is changing through legislation but [reliable] methods of authentication are currently pretty clunky," he says.

"Financial organisations are looking at things like 'two-factor' authentication, where the user has something like a thumb print, smart card or token as well as a PIN. And the Tax Office is looking at public key infrastructure encryption, but both these methods are involved and difficult to get working. They're for advanced users."
