Forms that Time Out

[jazzyjj]

Hello everybody. Subject line is pretty accurate. I'm wondering if any of you have ever come across website forms that just time out after only a short interval? Just a couple of days ago my father and I attempted to register on our preferred bank's website. I had previously read an article elsewhere online which highly praises this bank's accessibility efforts. So my father and I both had our computers handy, and we went to our bank's site and began the registration process. I should state here that I had an account with them before not online, so some of my information needed to be updated. But the form kept on timing out, and we had to call their customer service department. It all worked out in the end and it turns out that their website is very accessible at least on the Mac with VoiceOver, but it seems that some of the forms on there in addition to sign-up are timed. I think I'm going to email their accessibility team about this, but thought I'd also post about it here.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

A lot of ticket websites (Eventbrite, and I think Fandango) have a 6-7 minute window to complete a purchase before the tickets are released, but having the form straight up time out and give an error sounds super unpleasant.

[amadi]

My bank logs a user out of online account access after 20 minutes, regardless of what they're doing. I recently had to go in and download a year's worth of my statements, which was an unnecessarily complicated endeavor, and it was made worse by having to login 3 times to get it done, even though I was actively working the entire time. I understand that they want to protect people from others getting inadvertent access to private banking information, but why not pop up a "are you still working?" prompt?

[jazzyjj]

A prompt like that would certainly make sense to me. Not sure at this point if that's something my bank does, but I suppose I'll find out soon enough.

[jazzyjj]

Just commenting here again to say that http://www.afb.org has the same problem. Worse yet is the fact that they don't even have a message stating anything about the session timing out. Please see a later entry about that site though.