UX trip: FedEx delivery instructions

I'm never sure how these things make it into production - did someone test it? They must have relied solely on automated tests, I guess.

I had a FedEx delivery coming, and I wanted to add delivery instructions. There's a link as part of the tracking page, but it makes me set up an account. If I have to, sigh.

The delivery instructions page is dead simple - a drop-down for preferred location to leave a package, and a text entry for notes. 

However, the "submit" button at the bottom of the page is not enabled, and won't become enabled no matter what I type in the text field. I had to find the "try our new design" checkbox at the top of the page and flip to the new design for it to work. Strike 1: didn't test the old form, which is the default.

I tried to type in a front door code for my building, but when I typed #, I got an error "No special characters permitted". Somehow all punctuation is disallowed, including comma, period and apostrophe. Strike 2: It's not possible to communicate clearly without at least basic punctuation.

So I spelled out "pound" hoping that would work instead of hashtag or something. I went back to the form to edit my entry, and found it still wouldn't allow punctuation, but now it didn't display an error message, but instead just disabled the "submit" button. Strike 3: No message to tell me how to proceed. If I hadn't seen an error message previously, I would have no idea what was wrong. (How did they lose the error message?)

I did find a form to report an issue, and it let me describe a problem with the website. I hope the front-end devs get a chance to fix this annoyance.

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