How bad is your online experience?

As new technologies come along every day, we sometimes forget just how bad is the experience we still get from many an established web site.

Take my frustrations last Saturday when I wanted to make an online donation to a charity. I started from the home page of the company I use to make charity contributions, wanting to specify a charity and then log in to my account.

So I searched for the charity - a well known one, the Disasters Emergency Committee. It wasn't found, nor were any abbreviations for it. Today in talking to the charity company I found there is indeed an error in their search subsystem. But in small blue type on the home page were the words "Pakistan Flood Appeal". So I should have found those words by reading the home page? Not on your life. It's well established that people don't read web pages so much as scan them - see the interesting eye tracking pictures in this article by Jakob Nielsen:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

So twelve years after the idea of banner blindness was first raised it seems that many web designers aren't aware of it.

Then  I tried to log in to my account. I got a "web server error" message. Obviously the server for the user accounts was down. It was back up again on Monday. I was told that the server is always available at the weekend. Yeh - right. Perhaps they hadn't thought about (or couldn't afford) hardware to ensure uninterrupted running.

My third Saturday morning problem was a curious one. I went directly to the charity and tried to make my donation by phone - an automated system. All went well until I was asked to give the 3 digit security code on the back of my card. I was making my donation from my charity account, for which they had issued a special card. I turned over the card. No security code! On Monday I checked with the charity company. Yes there had been a problem. When the charity had updated their automated donation system they had forgotten that the card for my charity company did not have a security code on the back. So talks were now underway to resolve the situation.

The lesson from these experiences?  There are still many organisations that don't have useable websites.