twitterbaduigry

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"Complete your Free Twitter Account Signup
1 error prohibited this user from being saved
There were problems with the following fields:
Phone number has already been taken"

I've been trying to sign up and use twitter the past several days, based on recommendations from several friends. In short, the user experience of signing up and using it has been one of the worst of any of new web site based services that I've been trying out. The above is one example. When I tried to add someone from the site as a "friend", the site redirected me to http://twitter.com/account/create (the above page without the error message). When I filled everything in and clicked continue, the above is what I got.

This is a terrible user interface for error handling. From the top down.

1. "prohibited" ? That's pretty harsh.
2. "this user" ? Why are you talking about me in the 3rd person to my face? That's awfully impersonal.
3. "being saved" ? Some sort of oblique religious reference? The page says "Complete your Free Twitter Account Signup". How about saying something about the signup not being completed rather than introducing both a new noun "this user" and a new verb "saved".
4. "There were problems with the following fields: Phone number has already been taken" ? Um, hello? Do you see a phone number field on that form? I certainly don't. This is the kicker. The stuff above is just better copy. This is the worst of the problems. The site is telling me I have a problem, which has no obvious (or even unobvious AFAIK) way for me to solve it on this page. I'm stuck. This is a blocker, a roadblock, a UI deadend. Unforgivable.
5. Don't make it an error that the phone number appears to be taken - explain why this may be happening, and walk me through step by step with how to fix it. Whether I have to claim my phone number again or whatever.

Comments

	agendacide says: Same BS stuff happened to MJ and I, only with a slight twist: www.minjungkim.com/2006/10/30/so-this-is-messed-up/ I agree that whole phone number taken stuff has to be resolved. Mainly, before you get an account and claim the phone number attached to the account, you have to confirm it via your cellphone/device, actually. Seems like the smart thing to do, no? Posted 18 months ago. ( permalink )
	Nikita Kashner says: I kept getting a "oops something went terribly wrong" error message on a friends profiles, Twitter seemed to be bug free till they introduced some of the features, then all hell seemed to break lose. Posted 18 months ago. ( permalink )
	tantek says: Biz (presumably Stone) has noticed and blogged this bug report! To answer the question, it's absolutely free advice. Perhaps I shall have to try the signup page again tomorrow to see the results of their fixes. Posted 18 months ago. ( permalink )
	Luke Dorny (luxuryluke) says: Their support helped me resetup my phone again, but it's still not working like it was. I have a feeling they are scrambling to get this more solid. The service went offline shortly this afternoon. Chris Messina opened up the wiki, which will surely grow: twitter.pbwiki.com Posted 18 months ago. ( permalink )
	tantek says: Update - when I went to login yesterday, everything worked fine. No sign of the abovementioned problem. I'm marking this one as fixed as I can no longer reproduce the problem. Well done Twitter folks! My relogin experience continued: The sidebar said: "Welcome back. Tantek Çelik". Nice friendly touch. I saw recent Twitter updates from friends which was pretty cool. A nice prominent link to "Add IM address" which I promptly clicked and entered my GTalk. Nearly instantly Twitter added me as a friend on GTalk and IM'd me a code. I entered the code on the web site and started seeing updates via IM. Very cool. Much better than text messages. I decided to add/follow people, and the process of adding/following people seems very tedious. You have to navigate to their page (wait) and then click add or follow (wait) - for each person - that's way too slow! I couldn't find a way to view a list of all my followers either, noted that using Twitter, and within hours they added twitter.com/followers - wow that was fast. Now, follow me on Twitter. Posted 18 months ago. ( permalink )
	teradome says: that, and GoDaddy's checkout bug ("a required field was not completed" JS error message when all available fields were filled in - Safari AND Mac Firefox) were my two most-hated errors in recent months. Twitter was free, and support fixed my number from the backend. Good for them. GoDaddy? Ha. Won't pay for glaring problems like that, or for whatever patchwork system is beyond that shopping cart. Posted 18 months ago. ( permalink )

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twitterbaduigry

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agendacide says:

Nikita Kashner says:

tantek says:

Luke Dorny (luxuryluke) says:

tantek says:

teradome says:

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