The guy in the copy shop was gesticulating to one of his customers.
"I almost won 37 million this week!"
"What d'ya mean?"
"That guy who won the jackpot - he bought it at the same store I get my tickets!"
The customer chuckled and checked his copies - perhaps imagining, as I was, what it would be like to win thirty-seven-million-dollars. Tax free.
The next day, my neighbours were talking about the lottery too.
"Yeah, he called her and said 'I won the lottery' - just like that - and you know what she did?"
"What?"
"She hung up on him. Thought he was crazy!"
"And?"
"And he called her back and he told her again - 'I won the lottery. Thirty-seven million."
"For real?"
"Yeah. For real!
I thought about the lottery tickets in my back pocket. I was getting a strong sense that if it could happen to someone I almost know maybe it could happen to me - a sort of Luck-By-Association thing. The jackpot was up to 40 million again this week - they had dumped excess money into it - unclaimed prize money. How could anyone not check their tickets? Heck, you can do it on the web!
I thought I should check my tickets soon. I'll go to their web site. The lottery web site has a search by date page - great, that should make it easy. How wrong I was. For your benefit, dear reader, I've scraped off the code from the web site and this is it. Just enter June 13, 2007:
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Select Lotto 6/49 Ticket Date and Search |
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Huh? Yes, 'huh' indeed. If you want to enter the correct date (or any date more recent than December 31 2005!) you have to go through the process of entering a nonsense date and hitting 'Search'. Then it will give you this:
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The part that leaps out here is that the database is checked after the user has been forced to waste time (our time is always precious!) rather than checking before hand to find out what year it actually is. * Better yet, it would take a relatively small effort to offer the user only the vaild dates - the ones that actually had draws! Off the top of my head it could be something like:
This way the user wastes less time thinking about valid dates - that is the responsibility of the web server (or its programmer at least). It may seem like a small matter but think also about all those people who want to win the jackpot. Multiply the time wasted on this dysfunctional little date selector by the thousands and thousands of times it is used. That is not a small matter. Using a web site shouldn't have to be a gamble. Usability is a core part of the customer service we should expect. Perhaps some of that unclaimed prize money can be invested in fixing up the lottery.ca web site. Heck, they could call the User Advocate Group - I hear they can help in these kinds of situations. ;)
Footnotes
* Claims can only be made within a year of the draw date. That means that any date supported by this input mechanism refers to an un-claimable prize. (back to story)
I agree that giving you the
I agree that giving you the actual days the lotto was drawn would be relatively easy to implement and MUCH more functional.
The site www.olgc.ca (Ontario Lottery Gaming Comission) uses a similar mechanism but they return back matches for the closest lotto dates if the one you entered didn't have a draw. They also provide an option for "All" days for a particular month rather than forcing you to remember a day. I'd be interested in your assessment of their site. :-)