Why, Blog, Why?

A few months back I came away from TicketMaster.com with a really bad taste in my mouth, and 2 really expensive tickets in my pocket.

Unlike a traditional e-commerce site where you have time to evaluate your purchase before checking out, TicketMaster.com has unrealistic time limits on each step of the checkout. After searching for tickets, here's what they give you:

Confirm seating selection: 2 minutes
Log in or sign up for a new account: 1 minute

Complete purchase: 2 minutes

In the first step, it took nearly 2 minutes just to pull up the web site of the venue, find their seating chart, load their ridiculously slow Seating Chart Java applet, enter the section and row of the seats that TicketMaster was holding for me, and wait another 20 seconds for the 360-degree panorama to load. So by the time I did that and saw that they were really good seats I had just enough time to go back and click Continue. I had already been burned once by the time limit, so it felt like a pretty high-presure sale situation the second time around.

Next screen: sign up for an account in 1 minute. 7 fields (one of which is hidden until the end), 1 minute total, 8.5 seconds per field. That's crazy.

Last step: Checkout, 2 minutes, including billing and shipping info. Have you ever been rushed trying to enter a credit card #? You are guaranteed to make a mistake.

I was a bit shocked today to land on an Amazon.com product page and not recognize their new layout. Gone are the ubiquitous "tabs". Here's what I sent to them via their feedback form. (See the Functioning Form blog for a history of Amazon.com designs, including the new tab-less design.)

Every web design book that I've come across uses the Amazon "Tabbed Interface" as an example of "what works". It's ubiquitous as a design element that is simple, useful and compact. Certainly it has its limits as tabs are added (My Firefox browser is averaging upwards of 30 tabs and its difficult to wade through), but I would certainly argue that tabs are more user friendly than drop down lists (specifically non-UI-native, script based [JavaScript/CSS/whatever] drop-down lists) which are not always immediately intuitive and often quirky between browsers. I would prefer tabs - in fact I thought you had it right with the hybrid interface of most-often-used tabs with a drop-down overlay of other services. It allowed for easy access to (what I felt are) the most important sections, and everything beyond that was as close as a single click.

If the drop-down list must stay, please make it stay open on click (rather than a hover effect) with an explicit close/cancel button, otherwise I find myself chasing the menu with an over-zealous mouse. Older users may find the required precision difficult to master as well. Additionally, the target for showing the list should be bigger than the arrow graphic for the same reasons.

From Amazon's Q/A article on the design change it sounds like this has been something they've worked on for a while, so chances of them rolling back to the old design are slim. Still, given how often the tabs are cited as good design elements its sad to see them retired. I've yet to find a user interface that's as easy to use as virtual tabs.

In a recent post, Bruce Lawson, a member of the Accessibility Task Force and notable funny-guy, gives the following pointers on accessibility:

• Accessibility is not text-only or a separate “cripples-only” site
• Disability is more than blindness
• Accessibility is not an exercise in political correctness; there are demonstrable, measurable advantages in usability for all
• Accessibility isn’t a purely technical matter; it’s to do with content as well (and is thus also the reponsibility of the non-techy people in the organisation who produce content).

He also points out Legal & General as an example of a corporate web site that is both fashionable and accessible.

In a wonderful display of irony, Bruce’s contribution to the CSS Zen Garden project (a project revolving around beautiful, usable and accessible web site design) had me laughing out loud with a call back to Geocities personal home pages circa 1996. In this case, ugly is only skin deep :)