Wal-Mart's careers site has a similar problem: when you sign up for it, it makes you provide no less than FIVE security questions, which it claims are so you can recover your account if you lose the password. However, if you click on the forgot-my-password link, it tells you to just make a new account!

Posted by: Kalthare at May 9, 2007 06:37 AM

Well, it's certainly obvious that Sony needs good people. If you're better than the designer of that site, or the boss of the designer, press on. There's work to be done and money to be made. Time's awasting!

Posted by: tartan at May 9, 2007 08:23 AM

I've spoken with a few developers that are in charge of the User experience for websites, and it amazes me how little thought people actually put into these processes.

It's not that people have misconceptions about these issues; it's just that they simply don't think about why they're doing things a certain way.

I'll bet that the developer programmed that 'forgot password' page as a placeholder, figuring that once he got the important stuff done, he would come back and clean that up. But of course, they never got back to it.

Posted by: inspired at May 9, 2007 09:21 AM

When they build an airplane, they attach red tags to all the things that still need work. The entire plane is covered in lots of red tags, and until all the tags are removed by the person who put each one there, the plane can't go to the next stage. When I managed developers, we used a similar process, keeping track of all the red tags in a log. All stubs, blanks, dummies, dead ends, short tables, workarounds, things to fix later, etc., were logged. While not perfect, it surely helped.

Posted by: tartan at May 9, 2007 09:31 AM

I don't know if it's still the case, but several years back Intel's job listing site was also pretty unusable - it was based on a system by a well known database company that I won't name.

That company specialized in apps that were mostly used internally by employees, not by the public (this is probably still true), and unsurprisingly, the web site showed that by looking ugly, using weird terminology, and being generally hard to use.

Unfortunately the company-I-won't-mention probably makes lots of money training their customers to use their ugly software, so they may have little incentive to make it more usable.

That's pretty broken too!

Posted by: Sashazur at May 9, 2007 03:49 PM

Perhaps they simply don't care to hire you if you can't remember your password.

Posted by: Andrew at May 9, 2007 04:00 PM

Maybe they even removed it on purpose; sign-in problems are huge on the web today, creating a flood of calls / e-mails to companies' support centers.

Alternatively, they took a naive approach to implementing the technology that they so proudly show off, and forgot that they actually need to make an organizational effort too, i.e. set up a mailbox and appoint actual people to manage incoming mails.

I've seen a similar occurrence on an airline's e-mail newsletter: " To unsubscribe, simply go to ." which makes you wonder if they really want to allow people to unsubscribe.

Posted by: Zephyr at May 9, 2007 06:10 PM

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=sony_bullshit

Posted by: she-snailie_@_v at May 10, 2007 07:20 AM

LOL, Andrew

Posted by: astuartgirl at May 14, 2007 01:21 PM

You guys all forgot that this is Sony. This website isn't broken, it's just one of the few websites in the world designed in 100% compliance with the Digital Millennium Harassment Act.

Posted by: henrybowmanaz at May 15, 2007 07:36 PM