Feeling stuffed?

I was annoyed by two things today and I have decided to share them with you. ((Photo courtesy of Göran Arvidson)) It’s more about the sharing than actually imparting information, but these are two things I feel kinda strongly about.  The day is young yet, so I reserve the right to add more things to this list.  :)

1. I was going through my PayPal transactions for the last year and I discovered that providing a full and immediate refund costs me $0.30.  That’s pretty lame.  When they perform the refund, they get their money back.  All they’re out is a few zeros and ones.  And, frankly, it’s enough that I think my next few projects will be Stripe based rather than PayPal based.  PayPal’s API is a pain, I’m convinced requiring PayPal over a credit card (via Stripe) for transaction probably costs me conversions ((Oh, I could go on and on about PayPal versus Stripe and the posts about the relative benefits and conversions)) , and their policies are worse. 
2. Online forms that require multiple steps across multiple submission pages.  The first thing this kind of UI tells me is that the people who wrote the page wanted something done quickly and easily (for them) and didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about usability.  Because I have a tendency to overthink things, I sometimes go back and revise an earlier step depending upon what I see in a later step.  When I see an online form that requires multiple steps I will typically feed it bogus information first so I can see the rest of the steps.

Um.  That’s all I’ve got to grumble about today.

Actually, in hindsight, if those are my biggest problems of the day, I’m doing pretty well!