farmers insurance is not up to speed
2.05.2004
Regarding the buzzblog post of two days ago, “Orkut no friend to the blind”, I encountered an almost identical problem on the Farmers Insurance Web site recently. I was submitting a form to enroll in online management for my account when I got to a page with two graphic buttons — one for submitting and one for cancelling, presumably, but since neither image loaded, nor had any alt text, I couldn't tell which was which. I had to resort to right-clicking on the image placeholders and looking at the image filenames to know which image to click on, but I've had the vaguely uneasy feeling of not knowing exactly to what I was agreeing ever since. Understand, I wasn't surfing with images turned off, trying to catch them with a deficiency. I was just an ordinary consumer using a Web browser with entirely ordinary settings, trying to accomplish a task online. But I had to go to more than ordinary lengths to do so.
The lack of ALT attributes on the images was not the first problem I ran into while using the Farmers site. I ordinarily surf using Mozilla (tabbed browsing is the way to go), but I'm prepared for sites that will make me switch to IE (stupid, but not unexpected). I clicked on the Browser Requirements link and was pleased to see “Mozilla 1.0 or above” in the list of approved browsers. OK, I thought, I'm good to go. I filled out the first form with my information and then clicked “Next Step.” Nothing happened. I mean nothing as far as I could tell: the browser wasn't sending a page request. At first I thought “Next Step” was just a dummy button, because the mouse cursor didn't change when I hovered over it. So I viewed source to see what was going on with the page. “Next Step” was an image with an onclick event. I looked to see what functions it was calling and saw document.all. Many times. Not once did I see document.getElementById. The form validation script was using an IE DOM, and Mozilla was rightly choking on it.
I wrote a comment to Farmers explaining the problems with the site. I don't really expect a reply. I don't really expect the site to change anytime soon either. After I opened the site in IE and got through my problem with the submit button, the site told me to expect an e-mail from Farmers with a PIN so I can actually begin to manage my account online in three to five business days. I would say they're not exactly up to speed at Farmers.
Update: I guess I was just a shade inaccurate. Actually, the Farmers site must have said to expect a letter to be mailed to me with my PIN. I just received the letter. Maybe they do this for security reasons. But I didn't have to go through any of this rigamarole to manage any of my credit cards online, and if anything I'm a bit more concerned about the security of those accounts than of my renter's insurance account. Besides, there's very little I can do with Farmers' online service. I can view my policy details, pay my bill, or email my agent. That's pretty much it. I can't change the address I have on file, which is the reason I registered on the Web site in the first place. Wasted time. 02.09.04
