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Un-usability 101

The lack of self-awareness and usable solutions, even for large companies or public sectors / -providers, is sometimes astonishing.

We just recently bought our first car. Since it’s quite common that you have to pay toll when driving on Norwegian high (and low) ways, we signed up for a service called AutoPass. Being an AutoPass subscriber, you can pass through all of Norway’s AutoPass toll posts without having to stop (you also get a discount). The alternative is to pay by coins — perhaps multiple times a day.

Signing up on-line wasn’t very easy, though.

The sign-up procedure from Hell

When signing up for AutoPass, I first entered the most obvious URL - www.autopass.no - into my browser’s location bar.
Once at www.autopass.no, I had to figure out whether I could sign up online or not. This surely wasn’t as easy as it could, and should, have been.

After digging through several of AutoPass’ web pages looking for a sign-up form, I learned that in order to sign up for AutoPass online, you have to go through several steps. And web sites.

  1. First, I had to select the “Contact” section of the AutoPass site.
  2. Within “Contact”, I had to click “Addresses and Links”.
  3. Under “Addresses and Links” I had to locate my county, Rogaland, after which I had to
  4. Choose and select one of the companies responsible for running the AutoPass toll posts in Rogaland.

To me, the most obvious seemed to be “Bomringen på Nord-Jæren” (the company responsible for the Stavanger-area++, where I live), but do rest assured that there were absolutely no hints or guidance in place to help a potentially lost customer.

Clicking “Bomringen på Nord-Jæren” brought me to another web site, www.brotunnel.no (”bridge and tunnell”). On www.brotunell.no, I once again had to:

  1. Select “Nord-Jæren”.

Doing so gave me the option to sign up as new customer by

  1. Clicking a click here-link located a few (6) paragraphs down the page (Don’t Say ‘click here’).

Finally!

Conclusion

To sum it up, what could’ve taken me a few seconds - locating the sign-up web form for AutoPass - ended up taking me 5-10 minutes.

I wonder how many of AutoPass’ potential e-customers end up contacting the company by phone or letter after visiting AutoPass’ web site and not figuring out how to sign up on-line. Of course, this means that AutoPass spend big bucks on customer service representatives. At the same time, it leaves the customer reluctant to use their on-line services again.

The frustrating part is that it would have been incredible easy for AutoPass to include a sign up form at the front page of AutoPass.no. From there, customers could search for and/or select the desired responsible company (like Nord-Jæren) and sign up for AutoPass.

1 click instead of 100. Happy users instead of annoyed users.

Update: Jared Spool of UIE Brain Sparks has some interesting thoughts about advertising unimplemented features that are of relevance to this post.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 12:51 and is filed under Usability & Accessibility. 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.

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