I keep running into these, where the simplest question can not be answered.
For example I wanted to know what a Western Union domestic money order costs compared to a post office money order. The information for the post office is three lines:
$0.01 to $500.00 …$1.10
$500.01 to $1,000.00 …$1.50
Postal Military Money Orders……$0.30 (issued by military facilities)
But Western Union has no such lines. After entering my country and the country of the recipient and then the city of each and then then post code of each and then they can’t find my city of 50,000 which has been a city for two centuries. So I selected the capital and started over and it went on and on and no answer.
Tired of the game I again went to wait in line at the post office. Another customer hooked and then thwarted.
Another was Levolor blinds. I’d Googled “Home Depot vertical blinds” and they had the premiere ad, the site had the Home Depot logo and a Shopping Cart. Lots of information how to measure for all those types of windows, And no way to buy anything. Or even price anything. I just want to order a replacement for blinds that originally came from Home Depot and I can’t do it. Well Lowe’s Home Improvement Center and Bali Blinds just got my business. The site made me hate both sponsors.
Neither Papa Johns or Pizza Hut can get my address correct for online ordering. PJs sends my orders to the wrong store and won’t let me order from the correct one unless I switch to “Carryout.” PH just refuses to admit that my address exists.
I have sent notice of my grievances to both companies and nothing has come of it. They both will not get my business.
Update. I just found another path to the Levolor Home Depot site. and it seems to have information for ordering. Guess their ad link went to maybe a dud beta site.
But they still don’t make it easy. What do vertical blinds cost? Well they won’t tell me their prices I have to first specify my window measurements in eighths of inches, whether I want inside or outside mounting, the color, “name I want for my window”, and … Well I never did any of that. They had a second chance at me and blew it again.
Just show me the price list, which would have been half a page in a paper catalog.
There is a dating site that I’ve used a few times. When it doesn’t crash completely, it’s extrememly hard to navigate. You have to follow a really esoteric sequence of obscure links just to check your messages, and even then half of them never post. There’s so much crap on the home page with so many options, many of them animated, that you really have to scan the page carefully to find what you want.
I’m on the board of a facility that has discussed purchasing one of these. However, nowhere on the site is there any indication of how much one of these costs. No no, you have to call to speak to a representative, presumably so they can give you a sales pitch and get you emotionally invested in the product before they stick you with the price, which I’m guessing is significantly higher than what you think it should be.
They won’t be getting our business.
BTW, anyone know how much a Freestyle giant water slide costs?
The PayPal/UPS integration (i.e. someone pays you by PayPal, and PayPal lets you create a UPS shipping label) is horrible. A couple of years ago I encountered a situation where I kept getting “You have entered an invalid value” error. It didn’t tell me which entry field had an error. Earlier this year I tried it again and got the same error message!
I was interested in purchasing an iPhone accessory and the manufacturer’s website seemed to have a decent price. But there was no way to get a total including shipping without first creating an account on their website, which required me to create a username and password and provide my complete contact information.
The Air Canada site is infernally hard to navigate. They keep asking for information that I have to collect and then time out (and I have to start all over) before I have it. Then if you forget your password they will ask you a question and, when you answer, allow you to choose another, which, however is not valid for 24 hours. And when you try to pay by credit card, they ask for a PIN, not bothering to explain that that is NOT the 3 digit code on the back, but rather a PIN that the credit card company will give you on request. (I should mention that my recent replacement credit cards have come with a PIN and some terminals ask for the PIN, not for a signature.)
All in all, using it is one of the worst web experiences I have had. Incidentally, they charge $25 extra if you don’t use their web site.
Dunno if they’ve changed it recently, but last time I was using it (about a year or so ago), ebay was still a bloody pain over some things - finding the right help or policy/guidelines, finding the right category when reporting a dodgy listing, finding the right way into your own account options to change things like blocked bidder lists, etc.
And I don’t think it can just have been me being a bit thick - ‘how the heck do I find…’ questions were a significant chunk of the user forum topics. Most of the long-time sellers ended up bookmarking the links to the above-named bits, because they are damn near impossible to navigate to.
As a long time eBay seller (1486 feedback 100% satis) I’ve come to the conclusion (possibly paranoid) that this is quite deliberate, especially relating to anything that might cause eBay to generate a refund of any kind. Anything that will make them work, or pay attention, or cost them a dime is defended by a byzantine obstacle course of procedures.
This Milwaukee Journal Sentinel site is always forgetting my settings, Especially the daily comics I’ve selected. After re-selecting them a half-dozen times I gave up and went to another paper. www.jsonline.com
And the C-Span Book TV site is often wrong, only lists start times and not length of shows, When you click for “more info” you lose the reference of when the next show starts.
So you can never set your recording right.
And only lists start times in Eastern Standard Time, which of course is less than half their viewers. You have to convert the hours, and also the date for late night shows. Write to Congress. http://www.booktv.org/schedule.aspx
Charter.com will truncate passwords over a certain length when you register an account. It will not tell you this. So you create an account with a long password, get a message telling you that the account was created successfully, then are unable to log in using the password you typed in 10 seconds previous.
I don’t think you are paranoid at all. A few years ago my wife was a full-time power seller, so she knows her way around eBay. But she doesn’t do that any more. Recently she was trying to figure out how to close out her account (we’re still getting charged $14.95 a month). She thought it would only take a minute, but after much digging she still wasn’t finding what she needed. She gave up and is going to try again later when she has more time. The only conclusion I can draw is that this is dliberate on eBay’s part.
The list of idiotic, horribly desgned websites is legion. Among the ones that drive me nuts are those where you can’t find the shipping cost without going through the whole purchase ritual, and getting to the Cart just to find out.
I’ve never had the troubles you’ve had, but I don’t doubt they exist. Air Canada’s site is not easy.
One thing they could do to make it simpler is to allow users an easy way to find out when flights go where. In other words, a simple timetable would be nice to have to find out when flights typically go from Point A to Point B. As it is, I end up going through most of the rigamarole of an online booking to find out what my options are for flight times. Then I cancel the transaction (note that this is before I have to enter any payment information, so I know I won’t be mistakenly billed). For those of us who want schedule information, is it so difficult to have a link to a simple page or pages with various timetables, with suitable caveats about “schedule subject to change” and so on?
I see your Air Canada, and raise you Via Rail. I had the same stupid PIN issue buying a ticket there with my Mastercard. After I’d selected my payment method, I was automatically shunted to a Mastercard site registering me for a special security PIN. It looked for all the world like a phishing site, and I called Mastercard to check it out. No, it’s a new method for making my online transactions “secure” by giving me a PIN I can use at “selected retailers”. Never mind the fact that the 3-digit code on the back of the card is good enough for everybody else…
Oh, and ticketing itself is a pain too. On the Via Rail site, there’s no easy way to compare rates. There are at least eight classes of tickets to choose from, and the only way to compare them is to select them one at a time and note the prices yourself. It’s completely customer-unfriendly.
This kind of sophomoric douchebaggery is the result of letting developers, rather than UI-oriented web developers, run with development without a user-oriented champion.
I’m not saying all developers are like this, but the vast majority that I have encountered are. There is an overwhelming desire, in my experience, on the part of developers either to create programming pet tricks to impress themselves, or to fudge a solution from a system, without any regard whatever for the end-user. One application I worked on had a menu that could be floated - often by accident - but not re-docked. I asked the developer what the hell he was doing, and how it would benefit the user, and he said “I did it because I can”. This dork had a PhD in some computer discipline or other.
I currently work on the UI side of an eCommerce site. Unfortunately, I inherited it from my predecessor, who was [del]crap[/del] less into micromanagement of the user experience than I am. It features fun stuff like: the login username is a 5-figure number assigned by my company; if you forgot your password, it says “please enter your 5-figure user ID” - that’s it, like you’d remember that if you’ve forgotten your password; the reason for the lack of ability to enter your email address as an alternative to retrieve the password is that the database from which it draws its information allows duplicate email addresses 1. per user, and 2. shared by different accounts, meaning that a request for password retrieval will go to all users that have that share this email in our database; we sell services and products, but you cannot order both in the same transaction; two weeks before launch I discovered that the developers had omitted to provide a product hierarchy interim state - in other words, you couldn’t navigate to any products by category, unless you knew our accounting code for them (luckily I saved that).
The number of ways in which it sucks is astonishing, and I get the blame for the damn thing. Grrr. (By the way, I’m in marketing - I just feel the need to take control of this thing because it feels like, in company after company, I’m the only one with any common sense.) I’m totally on the users’ side on this. Corporations need to mock up how it works for the user, then fit the back end to the experience. Not the other way round.
I give you: Air Canada Timetables. You get to that by going to the main site and clicking on “Information & Services”, then “Flight Schedules”.
This link includes:
a page to enter the names of departure and destination to get a timetable by date
downloadable/printable timetables in PDF
a desktop program you can download which has a GUI schedule-finder and notifies you when the schedule has been updated
a version of that program for mobile devices
For good measure, here is the equivalent page for the whole Star Alliance network.
I’ve never had any problems with Air Canada’s website. I haven’t tried to purchase a flight with a credit card in a few months, though, so maybe the weird PIN thing is new.