I popped into the Witney branch of Robert Dyas today. Yeah, maybe I am a glutton for punishment. I found the can of WD40 I was looking for within minutes, so this isn’t another thrilling tale about my epic search for something-or-other.
In my post about the Travelodge website I got angry about a webform that wouldn’t let me press the Submit button. This post is about what can go wrong after you press Submit.
Today I needed to contact Nokia about a problem with the battery on my mobile phone. I didn’t fancy getting lost in an automatic phone system, so I decided to send an email to kick things off. So I clicked the link saying “Contact Nokia via email”.
The women gathering in the hotel lobby were obviously going to a really good party. There were two cowgirls and several pirates plus a bee, a princess, Snow White and Tinkerbell. But even Alice in Wonderland couldn’t tear my attention away from the usability-themed drama unfolding outside.
What’s causing the current unemployment problems? According to Iain Duncan Smith, it’s a failure to look beyond your home town for work. He gives the example of Merthyr Tydfil, whose inhabitants “didn’t know that if they got on a bus, an hour’s journey, they’d be in Cardiff and they could look for the job there”.
I’ve just been looking at the Google Analytics report for this site and spotted that some visitors found me while searching for “robert dyas anti fungal paint”. Of course, those visitors will end up on this page, which is a blog post about how I couldn’t find any anti-fungal stuff in Robert Dyas. (I would advise caution before reading the blog post; the tale may be too thrilling for web users of a sensitive disposition.)
Today's tale is my experience of buying train tickets from the First Great Western website. I was trying to buy a ticket from Oxford to London, returning on the following day.
I wanted to see all the return tickets available
What I did: chose “return” and typed in the dates of travel.
What I got: lots of different single ticket types, then one choice of return ticket (an off-peak return).
Welcome to the first in an occasional series of anecdotes about usability problems. It sounds a bit grand to call them case studies because they’re really just stories, so I’m calling them Real Life Tales of Usability Fail.