As a colleague of mine commented, “Undersea features are very important when looking for a mate. I want to make sure she can hold her breath for 30 days when she’s laying eggs. “
Browsing Posts in Bad Website Design
This is Citibank’s Business Credit Card account website. There are several problems with it: The URL does not explicitly mention Citibank or credit card. The security certificate pops up a warning in Firefox.
But the biggest problem is how it times out. Come on now! This is not some cheap joke-a-day website. Citibank of all people should be able to run a better website.
United Itinerary sent by email screenshot
I recently traveled via United from London to LAX, with a stopover in Washington DC. I checked my email in London airport and pulled up my itinerary. As you can see above, they only show the first piece of the leg. I needed to know what time the second leg, from DC to LAX, landed so I could arrange to be picked up.
But, the email only contains the first piece of the leg. To get the rest of the itinerary, I had to log into the website, which took its own sweet time and cost me another few pence (that pennies times 2).
Come on United! Do the right thing! Send the whole itinerary in your email!
Micorosft Live Messenger Bad Design
Another example of bad design at Microsoft. Here I have to choose one option and then hit OK. Why make me click twice? Why have a cancel button? This is an action that requires a decision, not chickening out.
Instead of me just complaining about it, I offer here is a replacement design. It is amateurish, the computer equivalent of a stick figure, but, at least I can come up with a good design without being worth 68 billion dollars.
Microsoft Messenger Live Fix
In this design, it is clear what your choices are: ALLOW or BLOCk. It also allows you to make this choice with ONE click instead of two. Imagine how much more productive America would be if everyone of its 300 million inhabitants saved one click per day!
E-Loan client page bad design
So I got a CD with e-loan. Nice company, good rates. I was even pleasantly surprised how I did not have to repeat my information to all the customer service people, they kept track about what was going on. Believe me, if you want a good rate and good customer service, get a CD from eLoan.
But don’t expect flawless website design. As you can see above, I logged in to do something. The website said it was down, but hey, it showed me the information anyway. Either you are down, or you are up. Anything in the middle means you don’t have control of your software.
Microsoft Office Error Message
Jay Leno has a favorite topic to riff about, ’stupid criminals’. Mine is ’stupid web design’.
The one above is a doozy. It says It has an error message. But it won’t tell me what to do with the error message. How do I view what is in the error report? How do I send the error message to Microsoft? What does ‘Debug’ do?
How dumb!
Microsoft Messenger Error Message
I could not get another cruddy Microsoft product, Microsoft Live Messenger to work correctly. So I click on the debug tool, and it pops up this weird connection Troubleshooter. So, the test results go through all of the steps and…. NOTHING. It still did not fix it. The design of this ‘troubleshooter’ is so bad, it is laughable. What does ‘Wireless’ mean? I was not using wireless.
Just for the record, it did not fix my problem.
I am continually amazed at how companies decide they want to save money and increase customer satisfaction by taking customer service to the web…and then they completely flub the user experience. As seen above, United Healthcare has taken complication to a whole new level. If I get this right, you have to enter a number as part of your username, unless you enter an email address, in which case you do not. Plus you can use some special characters but not all. Why not bar all special characters? Why not say ‘no numbers’?
This company should lookat how Google or Yahoo let people choose usernames.
So here we are at cheaptickets.com, where Virgin Atlantic has a special offer going on. Virgin flies from some major airports in the USA to London. So, since this webpage is a special Virgin offer, when you click on Airport Codes, you would expect to see the cities that Virgin flies from right?
But here is what we see:
Small things….this popup should only show airports Virgin flies from!
I signed up for automatic payment on SoCal gas company and I received this reminder.
Look at the area circled red.
Instead of making me think whether I have to sign in and pay or whether it will be automatically taken out of my checking account, why not just tell me whether I am signed up for automatic payments?
- Page 2 of 2
- Previous Page
- 1
- 2
