Digression while paying bills
May. 26th, 2008 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gerisullivanEvery month, I pay two phone bills. One is to Verizon, for my home service. The other is to Sprint, for my mobile service. And every month, these two bills leave me contemplating the psychology of form design both good and bad.
Both bills have boxes to fill in the amount paid. The Verizon bill has exactly the number of boxes needed. The bill is a 2-digit number followed by a decimal point and two more digits (for the cents). Surely some Verizon customers must have phone bills that at least occasionally exceed $99.99 -- my AT&T bill used to be over $100 frequently before I converted to an "all you can eat" long distance plan years ago in Minnesota. If I were making international calls, even my current bill could easily jump up.
I finally just pulled out my Agfa lupe magnifier and took a close look. Yep; it's a fuzzy-edged rule. Those boxes are custom printed the same was as all the other unique information on the bill. The program is no doubt sophisticated enough to print another box if the payment amount is $100.00-999.99. Good programming.
Which brings us to the Sprint bill. The boxes for the "Amount Enclosed" area are printed with every bill, just like on the Verizon bill, but here there are seven digits between the dollar sign and the decimal point, complete with commas separating the hundreds, thousands, and millions! Every single month, filling in my amount enclosed, I find myself recoiling in horror at the idea that any one's Sprint bill could be thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or one to nine million dollars. I never think "oh, see how small my bill is." All those extra boxes leave me fearing the day when I might suddenly have a bill that large. Psychologically, it's horrible form design -- for the effect on this customer, anyway.
Okay, back to the bills at hand....
Both bills have boxes to fill in the amount paid. The Verizon bill has exactly the number of boxes needed. The bill is a 2-digit number followed by a decimal point and two more digits (for the cents). Surely some Verizon customers must have phone bills that at least occasionally exceed $99.99 -- my AT&T bill used to be over $100 frequently before I converted to an "all you can eat" long distance plan years ago in Minnesota. If I were making international calls, even my current bill could easily jump up.
I finally just pulled out my Agfa lupe magnifier and took a close look. Yep; it's a fuzzy-edged rule. Those boxes are custom printed the same was as all the other unique information on the bill. The program is no doubt sophisticated enough to print another box if the payment amount is $100.00-999.99. Good programming.
Which brings us to the Sprint bill. The boxes for the "Amount Enclosed" area are printed with every bill, just like on the Verizon bill, but here there are seven digits between the dollar sign and the decimal point, complete with commas separating the hundreds, thousands, and millions! Every single month, filling in my amount enclosed, I find myself recoiling in horror at the idea that any one's Sprint bill could be thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or one to nine million dollars. I never think "oh, see how small my bill is." All those extra boxes leave me fearing the day when I might suddenly have a bill that large. Psychologically, it's horrible form design -- for the effect on this customer, anyway.
Okay, back to the bills at hand....
