Another bad example of user interface
I decide to sell my soul to the devil and get an Air Canada frequent flyer card. Not that I fly that often with Air Canada but I do once in a while for business.
I go the Aeroplan site and apply for a card. So far so good. Next page is where problems really start kicking in. First of all, I don’t get a Captcha image!
Weird I tell myself so I hit the “get another image” button without any luck. Being a geek, I look at the source code and try to generate an image manually – no luck. Oh well, I guess the server must be down or something..?
However, since I don’t use Internet Explorer, I decided to give it another try with the devil’s browser. And guess what? The image appears! Nice usability work guys…
Now look at this. This is the crappiest Captcha I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not a Captcha, it’s almost brain washing. Trust me, when you click “Try another image”, you get all kinds of funny messages like “2000 PaRTnerS wHo LoVe YoU Wo0t!!!11!!” and so on. And as you can guess, it’s pretty hard to type as you need to constantly switch between lowercase and uppercase.
BTW, is there really so much frequent flyer card fraud that you need to put captchas to prevent this? I’d like to know.
Oh well, let’s continue shall we? After all the work spent, let’s not stop here. Not that I really need the card but I might as well finish what I was doing…
Here comes the submit button – all looks good! Oh wait… another error? This time it says that my “street number” is out of range?
What kind of error is that? I live where I live, and my address is a 4 digit number. My address is not THAT big, how can it be out of range? So just for fun, I removed some digits until I eventually tried a one digit address – still no luck.
WTF?
Well at this point, I’m pretty upset but I still want my damn card. I have no idea what else to try… I guess that 99% of people would’ve quit at this point BUT NOT ME! :)
So I tried a few things, you know, basic try and error process… I finally changed the street name and added “rue” in front of it and guess what? It freaking worked!
So you tell me: how could a normal person (i.e. someone like my dad who is not computer savvy) could EVER figure out that error message? How can a normal person know that “street NUMBER out of range” really means “we couldn’t lookup your street NAME in our cheezy database”…?!?
What kind of shitty programming is that? What if you live in a new development where your street name might not be in their database yet? You are SO screwed!
I finally got my card and I hope I’ll never have to go back on that site. Anyone got any scary stories like that?
Sadly, cases such as this one abound… Had they done some basic testing they would have found those stupid errors (and I’m not talking about testing by the developer in his basement who probably did that!).
I have becomed an advocate of web analytics and online process optimization. That one is a shame! “Online subscriptions” should be one of their key performance indicators and basic conversion funnel analysis would tell them there is something going wrong in there. Doing form analysis would even pinpoint exactly the type of problems users are facing.
But honestly, they don’t even need a tool to measure the success of their online process… they just need someone who knows what he/she is doing to start with! Doh!
I agree with you. I didn’t talk about it but I’m curious what their % of completed form is. This is a very simple metric to follow. If it goes down the drain after the introduction of a redesign or a change, ask yourself why.
It’s also a shame that many sites are still “made” for IE. With more people using iPhones, iPods, cell phone and other non-Microsoft platforms, you simply can’t afford the luxury of denying any visitor.
I got the same problem when trying to change my address for bell.ca. Maybe they all bought the same software to handle users.
My friend got a one free year subscription to the ACM.
The ACM of all organizations had such a bad website that my friend now apparently lives in the Canadian province of Alabama: http://www.skrud.net/articles/2008/03/05/acm-and-the-canadian-province-of-alabama/
@Rob: I wouldn’t be surprised :) I’ve had so many problems with ExpressVu. I’ve been Bellfree for about 5 years now, including my land line.
@Guillaume: Wow, I don’t know if i should laugh or cry. This is pretty pathetic :) I’ve had a similar case and I ended up typing “Montreal Quebec G1Q 1Q9″ in the city field and I used CA as the state. it worked :)