How bad can website useability be?
Ralf Haller
March 29th, 2009
It is in general better to talk about the good things and best practices rather than the bad ones. This holds true even if one can often learn more from the bad or the things that went wrong.
But today I am sitting for the second time this week at CDG airport in Paris, and using the Wifi login from Hub Telecom. They seem to have a sort of monopoly here, as I could not find other service providers to use - in public areas, at least. Lucky for them, as I would certainly have dropped them by now and never, ever used them again in my life. Reason for this is that it took me a totally frustrating 30 mins to figure out how to log in using their entirely user-unfriendly website. The screenshot below shows you the starting screen; now, guess which button you have to press to be able to sign on using your credit card?
The answer is: you need to click on the red bar that looks like a normal menu bar. The fact that they then switch from English back to French again was not a problem for me, but I would guess that many non-French speakers dropped it there and then, despite being the “smart” ones who managed to actually clear the first hurdle. Particularly as they made the biggest button on the credit card form page the “Annulation” (Cancel) button all in red. Even more of a problem for me was that they had the form field for the bank card number that you find on the back of the credit card also sort of hidden on the page, so that I got stuck there for a couple of minutes, too!