Amazing Cisco

What kind of mind decides that a "contact support" form should have a 128-characters limit? That said, when there is an issue with an account and it gets disabled, what kind of mind decides "let's not send an e-mail to the customer about it, he'll figure it out next time he tries to use our service!"?
#CustomerSupportFail #UIFail :)

So 24 hours later, #Cisco support has contacted me once, to tell me that my request was bumped from one department (technical support) to another (client manager)... Awesome...

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Posted on January 24, 2012 by Markos Giannopoulos in Design, Web Development

10 Responses to “Amazing Cisco”

alireza hosseini · Jan 24, 2012 1:54 pm

they see user experience from behind, that's why u see this!

Markos Giannopoulos · Jan 24, 2012 2:15 pm

+<a href="https://plus.google.com/104782259365949728034" class="proflink" oid="104782259365949728034">alireza hosseini</a> yes, they probably have stats on how many people give up after trying to fit a message in there :)

Ian Zepp · Jan 25, 2012 1:35 am

Me. I'm the guy that makes those types of decisions. Although usually it's a 255 character limit.

Markos Giannopoulos · Jan 25, 2012 8:11 am

so how do you end up with such a decision +<a href="https://plus.google.com/105664561288207599629" class="proflink" oid="105664561288207599629">Ian Zepp</a> ? :)

Ian Zepp · Jan 25, 2012 12:18 pm

[Long discourse ahead. Fortunately G+ has no 128 char limit on comment boxes]... There are a number of technical and business reason why this limit might be here. In no particular order: Technical reasons: - It's an old field, from an old software version, was size-determined years ago, and maps to a fixed width database column. - If you change the table column size, you maybe have to rebuild the table. - You could change to a varchar, but then that probably affects your indexing and other existing internal and external code that depends on the field type. - There are likely third party vendor integrations that may themselves have max size limits. Changing the size of this field means you now have to retest all those integrations. - For an integration, it's likely this field is exposed via WSDLs. Changing the size invalidates those WSDLs. - Automation (business rules, workflows, emails, etc) certainly depend on this field. Some of those expect data no larger than a certain size from this field. Again, cascading changes. Business process reasons: - The longer the field, the harder to search/report on data. Analytics would rather have data in fixed-option dropdowns or checkboxes than scattered throughout text fields. - This form almost certainly creates a new case/issue for customer support (that's the point, really). Those cases will already have support for case comments internally, and THOSE fields will probably have much larger limits. - If you give people the chance to write an essay, a lot of times they will. Keeping the field size small forces a concise summary, and pushes a lot of the supporting data into either the case comments or into the fixed-option fields. - Most of the time the text in the box isn't really useful. "It's broken when I do this!" isn't something that really helps. So the box is partially there as a placebo. So, there are lots of reasons (some valid, some legacy, some cost-of-change) why it might be that way. :)

Markos Giannopoulos · Jan 25, 2012 3:43 pm

thank you for the analysis +<a href="https://plus.google.com/105664561288207599629" class="proflink" oid="105664561288207599629">Ian Zepp</a> but you can't describe a problem in 128 characters. in that sense, a support form is the first step to helping the user. if this isn't achieved, there is no point to having a support form

Ian Zepp · Jan 25, 2012 4:41 pm

Have you run analysis of support form average comment lengths? It's quite possible that within a standard deviation or two, most comments fall under 128 characters, and longer issues belong in a case comment, instead of the initial form submission. There is a very real cost to changing architecture once it's in place and other support systems are built around it. You are a sysadmin, you know this. And in the case of this specific screenshot, Cisco WebEx is a large, old, and complex product. While at a basic level I agree that the comment size should be larger, you asked why someone would make that decision. That's why people make those decisions. :)

Markos Giannopoulos · Jan 25, 2012 5:10 pm

well i just run a quick query on one of our systems, the average message is 310 characters :)

Ian Zepp · Jan 25, 2012 5:49 pm

Then it wouldn't work for you. But is that correlation or causation? :p Anyways, not going to argue to point any more.

Markos Giannopoulos · Jan 25, 2012 5:51 pm

LOL i'm sure if Cisco does a query they will find that all their messages are below 128 chars so there is no point to make a change :)