Have you run into major commercial websites that were really hard to use?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Renfe. Spain’s rails.

Thing is, there have been periods when it worked well…
Right now:

  1. the drop-down menus don’t play well with “type the first letter of the town you want to find.” If I want to find, say, Tudela, opening the drop-down and typing T repeatedly won’t move me beyond Tarragona.
  2. the letters are tiny.
  3. the system can’t deal with Renfe’s own Retired Folks Discount Card,
  4. but doesn’t tell you until after you’ve filled in all the info,
  5. in a form which is horribly misaligned (in Chrome, Firefox and IE).

That’s what I remember off the top of my head, the letter I sent to them recently had 16 bullet points.

22

This guy desperately needs a smack upside the head. No, he needs SEVERAL smacks upside the head. He needs to understand that the point of designing a commercial website is to encourage the user (who is often computer illiterate, and may well be computer phobic) to spend money at that site. The point is NOT to discourage users from even returning to the site because of their bad experience.

I speak as a customer who is only semi-computer literate, and not at all computer phobic. I LOVE shopping online. I spend lots of money online. And if a site is at all difficult to use, well, there’s almost always some other company who offers the same thing, or nearly the same thing, and their site is easier to use.

Right now, it’s an employer’s market. May I suggest that you fire, or encourage the firing of, this douchebag?

23

My bete noir is commercial websites which ask for your post code, and then fill in the rest of your address automatically, without the ability to edit it.

This becomes a problem for me when they are still using an out-of-date database, because my address was briefly listed slightly incorrectly back in 2003. I can’t even submit an order because my card payment details don’t match the address they have - and this only becomes apparent at the checkout stage, sometimes after hours of shopping.

I’ve come up against this several times, with the worst offender to date being the Great Universal group. Please guys update your d*mned database! :frowning:

24

Try to find job listings on WalMart.com. They put you though an exhaustive signup process that has you basically filling out a job application, I was looking for a friend but gave up after “Step 1 of 8” turned into “Step 1 of 10” after that, and they were asking for social security numbers and whatnot, I got tired of making stuff up. Just to see job listings, which I never succeeded in doing!