4M

My mom was nice enough to give me a plane ticket for Thanksgiving. She emailed me my e-ticket and told me I needed to call or email United to register Brandon as a lap baby. I thought, how do I register him as a “running-down-the-aisles-kicking-the-back-of-seats-playing-peekaboo-with-flight-attendant baby?”

So off I go to United’s website. I copy the link in the email called “My Itineraries” thinking that might take me to my itinerary so I could click some little button that says, I’ve got a baby that’s coming with me.

Ah, but that would be too easy.

That link, if you click on it you’ll see, takes you to some help page that doesn’t even begin to address the one small specific problem I have. All right. I live, eat, breathe and often sleep on the web. I can figure this out. I hunt through United’s awful mouseover-drop-down navigation bar. Bad usability two, one being the link to a useless place. I get options to login with my Mileage Plus number. If I’m traveling on a gift ticket, why would I know the Mileage Plus number of my giftor? I click twice, three, four, ten times trying to find what I need. I’ve already copied my locator number from my e-ticket, which I stupidly assume is useful when trying to find my itinerary. I enter it in every box I can find. Nada. I start to feel really stupid. I can’t possibly be this stupid, can I?

I go back to my email. At the very very bottom in teeny tiny type I find my mom’s Mileage Plus number. Hurray! I remember her password and get myself logged in.

I still can’t find the link to my itineraries.

Then I find it - and it tells me I don’t have any itineraries. I finally find a place to enter my locator number… and it tells me my itinerary doesn’t exist.

Ok. This is bordering on absurd. I’ve now spent ten minutes trying to do a 3-second task.

I give up. I call the customer service number for United. And then I start to snicker. The wooden compu-voice tells me “you can find what you need at United.com”. I hold back my snickers and try to be a good docile consumer. I listen to all my options. None of them address my needs. I wait. I do nothing. I try and pretend to be a rotary phone user so I’ll get a person. Ah but no. Not so easy. I get slightly less wooden compu-voice number two. You know the kind. The one that tries to sound like a real person, albeit a very … developmentally delayed and hard of hearing person. I’ll call him Fred.

I listen to Fred’s long list of options. Finally he gets down to business and asks me for my locator number. Aha! I think. I have that. I very, very slowly and clearly enunciate each digit, giving, as requested, common names with each letter. U for United. A for Apple. K for Kitchen. etc.

Silence.

He comes back and repeats it back to me. UKKblahblah, completely wrong. The snicker starts to well up. I’m still trying to be good. Yeeeww for United. Aaaaay for Apple. Kaaaaay for Kite. etc.

Silence.

Fred mucks it up again: UBZZZ…
I totally lose it and start laughing out loud and manage to snort NO when he asks if it was right.
I give it one more try but I can’t contain the giggles at the sheer absurdity of the situation and I just give up. Then I start begging for help. Help. HELP. Zero! Customer Service! A person!

Fred starts talking to me again, trying to clarify what I want.

Then I start to shout. HELP!!! HELP!!! And start laughing again at the silliness of 21st century life. I’m screaming for help from a computer because the first computer failed me and the second computer is too dumb to understand me.

Then I start leaning on my zero key. BEEEEEEEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEEEEP. Fred tries one more time. I’ll connect you with a person, he says somewhat reluctantly, but I need to know where you want to travel. He gets a big ole BEEEEEEEEEEP in his mechanical ear. Screw you, Fred, I’m done. I want to talk to somebody in Pakistan. Cause I just know that’s who I’m going to get.

Sure enough … Human Being With Discernible Accent picks up the phone. He tries to convince me his name is Steve Lucas. Dude. I know your name is not Steve Lucas. Your name is completely unpronounceable. But I’m not mad at you. You’ve got to support your family just like I do. It’s all good. Just get my problem solved and let’s both get on with our lives.

So I say, ok “Steve”, I need to add a lap baby to my itinerary. I give him Brandon’s name. He tries to upsell me some car rental services but does it in the heavily-accented-70-mph voice and it’s all I can do to be polite and decline whatever it was he just said.

Anyway. All this to say: Design matters, people. Usability matters. You’re affecting my life when you design a bloated, unusable corporate website with “design-by-committee” stink all over it. Take a clue from The best designed airline website around. Song spent a bunch of money and time to hire the absolute best experts in branding, design and usability. Their homepage has six main links. Six. Not six thousand. One big compelling image, three links above, three links below, some small text links at the bottom that they know noone will click on but figured they should make available just in case. White space galore. Simplicity. Elegance. A calming feeling.

Have a look at both sites for yourself. Ugly United and Simple Song.Personally, I’d rather pay Song to fly than fly free on United. Wouldn’t you?

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 2:10 am and is filed under Usability, Marketing, Rants & Raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.