The “Afghani Banker” Syndrome

re: The “Afghani Banker” Syndrome

johnsm — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 01:08:49 GMT

A couple thoughts...

One way to solve the Afghani Banker syndrome is the change the way we question customers. For instance, Instead of having a user select a country from a drop down, if you ask them to type it in and provided an AJAX-style auto-complete suggestion as they typed, it would at least prevent the "first-on-the-list" click through behavior.

Additionally, if you clocked users entering information on a form, perhaps the ones that are filled out before a certain timeout period should be discarded from the dataset as it would suggest bogus information.

re: The “Afghani Banker” Syndrome

Dan Fernandez - MSFT — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 18:51:48 GMT

[accidentally deleted this comment from user "TK" so I'm manually re-adding here]

**start
Just a suggestion, but if you have to be connected to use the form anyway, why not hook up with one of the IP geolocator services to put the user's (best guessed) location right at the top of the country list. It doesn't help the zip code problems much, but at least it cuts down on one part of the problem.
**end

My Response: Good Idea :)

re: The “Afghani Banker” Syndrome

Steve Tiriac — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 03:52:58 GMT

Hi,

Funny the story with Bouvet Island. I didn't know it was the place for "Alien vs Predator".

I discovered, recently the "Express" version of MS tools and I was delighted! Usually I soak in a world far away from MS but I'm curious enough to try what you, guys put on shelves. So, as I newer spent the $500+ to buy a decent Studio suite, same for my coworkers we managed, somehow to have our boss buying it even if we don't have a direct usage. But this scheme newer let us play enough with the thing (we are using the editor).

Now I did install the express 2005 at home and I play with. You got an enemy in the person of my wife but I just don't care :o) I have to say I'm impressed by the move. I saw the numbers above and I think there are a lot of folks out here willing to try and play with this excellent tool which is "Studio". Giving it for free you made all this guys happy and is a good thing for MS. Carry on like this and you'll see deflating for real the <<enemy army>>. :o).

Again, bravo for the tool and for the move !

Cheers,
Steve.