New Trend In Industry

A trend has developed in the forms processing software industry. This is a trend to display only the rejected characters and ask the operator to specify what character is displayed. After much criticism, some vendors have moved these rejected characters to a strip or ribbon, and then shown the contextual material below the strip.

I question this approach. It appears to be on the same level as the about 1970 process of showing a field as keyed, and then asking the operator to rekey the field as a verify process. This did not work; the field had to be hidden to get the operator to focus on the data to be verified.

Industry Needs A Study

The industry needs a study of the results of this ribbon verify method. To me, it appears that ribbon verify only encourages guessing and the guessing will result in character substitution. Without context, we know that recognition will be difficult because some very sophisticated software has not been able to make an out of context decision. The problem created by ribbon verify is magnified when operators are on an incentive system which is mainly based upon characters/hour.

Unibase by DMAC has not added a ribbon verify strip. We still feel that a character which cannot be recognized by software should be determined by an operator looking at the character in context. The operator should not be tempted to key a substitute character by using a ribbon verify strip.