User Friendly Online Shopping
Being a big believer in retail therapy, I like to do my share of shopping. A fair amount of it being online. Hence I have little patience with e-commerce sites whose forms don't work. Yesterday I was talking about buying some photo-management software. Well, I've been using ACDSee, and like it enough to want to buy it. Today I tried and failed to buy it. Here's why:
If you add the software to a cart and proceed to the checkout, the first thing you do is fill in your billing details. Part of this is your email address. If you use a Hotmail address, like I chose to, you see this message:
The message tells you they can't accept this e-mail address and that, if you don't have an alternate address, you should "click ". Doesn't say where to click. Just ends there. After a little digging round I found this FAQ which explains that Hotmail is "insecure" and so can't be accepted. Also offered is a workaround, whereby you enter your email address in the company field (?).
Being such an obstinate sod, I chose to email them (before I happened upon the FAQ) to find out why. I could have easily used another address, but that's not the point.
Shopping should always be a pleasure. E-commerce forms have to work first time if you want to keep a customer. Ever been to a shop to buy something expensive, that you've been looking forward to buying, and the shop assistant has had a bad attitude? Spoils the whole experience doesn't it! So can a badly thought-out shopping-basket policy.
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Funny you should have that happed; there was a column in the New York Times yesterday addressing the same issue.
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You're not the only one who gets annoyed by this!
Whoops, that was supposed to say "happen"...can't type on Fridays!
There must be so many of these stories. Maybe there's money in offering e-commerce companies an evaluation of their site. Nielsen style.
Again, today, I was booking a hotel online for a Valentine gift for the gf. Filling in the credit card details I was informed by JavaScript prompt that the number was "invalid". I checked and double-checked but it wouldn't take it. If I weren't a web developer myself I wouldn't have guessed that I needed to remove the spaces.
Validation is one thing, but has no-one (besides Lotus) ever heard of input translation? A simple f.value = f.value.replace(/\s/g,''); would have fixed that.
Oh, and I don't think any commercial site would voluntarily subject themselves to a Nielsen-style usability check-out. They tend to like things like logos and graphic buttons; Jacob doesn't. That's not to say that usabiltiy testing shouldn't be considered mandatory on a commercial site -- just that Nielsen-style usability runs contrary to commercial sturm-und-drung.
Wow! A reason to compliment Lotus ;) Nice one Stan.
Since getting a .info domain and email address, I've had countless troubles with online form validation telling me that my email address is not valid. Usually it is because the validation insists that the first part of the address after the first dot should never be more than 3 chars in length (.co .com .net etc). Surprisingly a couple of the places that I advised of this fixed the bug within a couple of days, so all is not lost!