Practicalmadness

In their many television, print and outdoor advertisements, the hard-working, brown-shirted men and women of the company ostensibly known as United Parcel Service — better known to most of us simply as UPS — ask the eternal question, “What Can Brown Do For You?”

And today, the noted multi-hyphenate James Duncan Davidson has offered up an answer:

Could you please, pretty please, with sugar on top, get rid of the damn checkbox that you have to click in order to track a package? Each and every time you want to track a package? Even if you just clicked it thirty seconds before while tracking a different number? You know, the checkbox right under the tracking number field. This one:

What I am curious about is the certainly long, tedious process — involving not only UPS stakeholders and various user experience “experts,” but also lawyers, grammarians and more lawyers — that resulted in this massive global corporation concluding that simply telling people there were certain terms and conditions for using their package-tracking web application was not sufficient legal cover against whatever-the-fuck liability they’re worried about.

Really, what would be so wrong with something like this?

I call it the “Yes, Asshole, There Was A Sign Posted” theory of liability. Just because you didn’t have to sign a waiver acknowledging that you can’t drink beer at the public pool doesn’t mean you are therefore allowed to drink beer at the public pool.

In addition to being agreeably simple, it leverages the fact that users are already being asked to perform an action, and simply makes agreement with these very important Terms and also-important Conditions part and parcel with the act of asking where your goddamned package is. Even if the relevant suits at UPS don’t understand usability, surely they could get behind an argument that involves “leveraging” something. But no, someone insisted on this cumbersome poka-yoke contraption.

The only possible justification I can think of is that they’re storing and tracking this information to cover their own asses in the event someone figures out a way to use this tracking information for evil.

Of course, they’re not requiring any personally identifying information, nor do they really provide any beyond the cities of origin and destination. But it’s not hard to imagine there’s a massive Oracle or SQL Server database (or five) somewhere, full of all the IP addresses and package numbers ever input into this box, along with a little “1” to indicate that yes, this person agreed to the terms and conditions. Just in case they ever need to refer back to those logs in order to demonstrate that whoever it was that asked after that porn you ordered that never arrived did, in fact, check that box.

Then again, compared with the local UPS office’s bizarre requirement that you bring two forms of current ID with you to pick up a package they couldn’t deliver because they totally thought you’d be home at 8 PM on a Friday night, this almost seems friendly of them.

So I guess we should all just be thankful we don’t have to check that box in triplicate or anything.