John M. Wargo

A few weeks back the press announced a new BlackBerry site managed by RIM called myblackberry.com. I quickly went online to see what it was and was frustrated for several weeks by its unavailability. Last week the pundits started announcing that the site was live so I went out again to try to access the site. Here's what I got:

I decided to try again today and was able to access then register with the site. Funny thing happened when I registered, it allowed me (actually required me) to set my own security question, but for some bizarre reason forced a minimum length for my answer. See below:

I dutifully entered my question and the answer but found that it was too short. What was I to do? I coudn't change my answer to fit the minimum length required by the form. Rediculous. I had to pick a different question to use.

I have to admit that I hate it when web developers force a requirement for an input field but don't tell me about it until after I populate the field wth the value I want to use. How much simpler would it be to tell me in advance what the requirements are so I could assess my security question and associated answer before hitting the submit button? I would have known immediately that my 'answer' was too short and selected a different question. Of course, after returning to the form you see above, certain of the fields I'd populated were blanked out, so I had to repopulate other portions of the form as well. Not a very helpful design.