Comments on: Another bad example of user interface

By: Denis

Denis — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:41:20 +0000

@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 :)

By: Guillaume Theoret

Guillaume Theoret — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:18:45 +0000

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/

By: Rob Britton

Rob Britton — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:45:56 +0000

I got the same problem when trying to change my address for bell.ca. Maybe they all bought the same software to handle users.

By: Denis

Denis — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:24:43 +0000

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.

By: S.Hamel

S.Hamel — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:07:51 +0000

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!