As you might have or have not guessed, we use WordPress (version 2.7 by the time of writing) with a few bolts on as our CMS for this site. Needless to say how much we like WP, how good and flexible it is – once you have understood what its overall concept is and what it is made for in the first place.

During the process of setting up this site though, we came to a point that was giving us a headache for an evening and had us thinking WP had a severe bug when there wasn't any, except for what we'd call a serious flaw in terms of usability and such. I am going to explain what had happened in order to make my point - It is not enough to have a technically correct working system if you don't put the highest of attention to the user, his expectations and to how your system communicates.

For starters and without going too much into the details, WordPress gives you the opportunity to add what it calls Custom Fields. Basically, these can be used on a WP-driven site for almost anything that isn't a built-in functionality and therefore give you a great deal of flexibility. They consist of a Name (Key) to address the field later on, and the fields content (Value/Wert) to be processed.

Portion of WPs admin-interface to set up custom fields

So when setting up this site (and being the structured worker that I am), I wanted to define some of the custom fields I was going to need first, and fill them with values later on. So I entered a name for the field, left Value blank for later, and hit Add/Create Custom Field.

Enter a key name, leave value blank...

But all I got was a nicely styled alert that told me that an unidentified error had occured (At least in the right place – the context where the error had occured). So I began to wonder what I had done wrong, if it was a WordPress bug, if I really wanted to wait for the next version to hopefully have it fixed and thereby postpone our site going live until a date unknown, or just switch to a different product immediately.

...and get a rather unspecific error message!

As you do, I started browsing and searching the WP support forums. As it goes, not to much avail. What WP didn't tell me was that you need to enter both key and value at ONCE, otherwise WP wouldn't create the required Custom Field. Which is perfectly fine - as long as you know about it.
And yes, by one of those twists of fate, I entered something for Value too and hit the button...

Enter something for Value too...

...et voilá, WP created the field (with a nice yellow glow effect that's worth creating Custom Fields alone)!

... and WP creates your Custom Field!

So apparently – from a technical point of view – everything is fine here: We have two fields and a proper validation. But dang, the user is led to believe something's just not working, he did something wrong and ends up overall frustrated, in doubt of either his own intellectual capabilites or the system itself.
Why is that? Simply because the system doesn't give him the information that he needs: Fill in BOTH fields, please.

As far as I can see, this would be easy to implement: There's two fields, a validation for both, so it shouldn't be too hard to validate what fields content is missing and tell the user in the most polite, informative and specific way what has happened and what to do now. He'll be comfortable, happy and love the system. Just as much we love WP - apart from that little flaw described here...
Thank you.

Specific message for happy users!