There must be a better way!

There have been a number of frustrations lately when I have tried to use applications in my daily life. It makes me think about how software is meant to make our life easier, better, yet it’s often filled with flaws, thus frustrations. I believe there is a better way to learn about usability and create apps/products that do make things better without people feeling frustrated.

Pausing our milk delivery

As a family we had a mid week break away and before we left I had to pause our milk bottle deliveries (we get glass bottles instead of the plastic rubbish), so I navigated to their website and tried to login. Login failure. I tried another password and it failed again. Then when I tried a third time I got a message to say that I’m locked out of my account for 15 minutes. 15 minutes!! What a pain! What I tried to then do is follow the reset password and I received an email with a Verification code. There was no link to click on anything in the email or anything on the website to input the verification code. Another failure. I got so annoyed that I emailed the support email and asked them to pause our deliveries for this date and then went about my day, rather than fixing the root of the problem.

There’s a couple of things in this.

1. When I emailed the company I mentioned that I am having trouble logging into my account and could they pause my delivery. They did not ask what exactly the problem was, so they were completely oblivious of the annoying 15 minutes I had to wait around or there was no where to put the verification code.
2. I feel people are experiencing software failures daily and simply not reporting them. If you have zero customer complaints, it still does not mean there are no software flaws.
3. 15 minutes lockout — This is seriously annoying. On reading it seems to be the standard to be followed. It would be much better if they emphasised resetting your password after a few failures in my opinion.
4. Verification code — This makes me laugh. They have a part of the system where the user journey automatically ends. I will email them with these details because well, I care about good software.
5. They are very lucky I have been doing lots of meditation these last months ;) My patience is pretty good, others would probably look to cancel their delivery with this type of frustration.

Ordering school uniform

Yes it’s that time of the year where the boys have seemingly grown a few inches over the summer and it’s time to buy school uniform. I login to the school account, choose what we needed and then go through the ordering details. At the end there is a captcha that I tick and submit a button, then the button disappears!! There is no way to see if my order is going through or not. This type is called “feedback” where as a user you understand what the product is doing. So I waited for a few minutes, still nothing, so I decided to refresh the page, still nothing. Then out of the blue I receive an email to say it has gone through even though the page is still on that checkout page. Absolutely rubbish in my opinion, but phew, I got an email. I am a little worried it may have gone through a few times by accident, so I better check my account.

Overall, checking the inputs/outputs of a product are very important. Next when you’re testing have a think about how you can tell what state the system is in. Is it waiting for you to do something — if so, can you clearly see what that is? Or are you waiting for something to happen, does the system show you that state.

Summary

In summary, there must be a better way. As an idea, perhaps a bit like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines we could have a Guideline for creating Products that are usable to level everything up. How awesome would that be!