Well, a lot of bad. There are OK and there are so-so user experiences, but then there's Nebraska Furniture Mart:
Don't be Nebraska Furniture Mart. Here is what happens when you don't do UX and have developers design your screens. Let me go ahead and do the UX critic thing, giving you a quick and satisfying list of design gripes. But wait, there's more! Don't leave before the dessert: I'm also going to tell you why the slapdash UI isn't even the worst problem here. Stick with me, and I'll explain what is, why that is, and why it's important to understanding user experience design.
- Visually, this belongs in 1997. The cramped headings, the grids, the hard green borders? Not pleasant.
- Buttons look like they're tossed onto the page to land in random places.
- Why is Cancel to the right of Continue? Does NFM want Cancel to be my first choice?
- Why is there a bulleted list describing what to do, when it's obvious (a) because I just clicked a button to go to a payment screen and (b) because the fields and labels on the page make it obvious?
- The error message at the top of the page, which orders me not to use a comma in numbers, commits a grammatical error — a comma splice.
- Field labels and two of the buttons are proper cased, but on the “pay with a different account” nobody noticed that it's all lower case.
- There's an error, but nobody made any effort to indicated where the error is. They just slapped a banner on top of the page.
- Seriously, guys, you couldn't be bothered to teach your application that 50 = 50.00? Of all the lazy field validation I've seen, that has to be the worst.
Why is this bad?
Nothing, if you're a mom-and-pop business and a ramshackle, DIY look is part of your charm. Nebraska Furniture Mart, however, is a multi-million dollar business with well-designed, gleaming furniture mega-marts in multiple states. Walk into a NFM store, and you don't feel you're in a cut-rate emporium. Nobody would dream of outfitting those stores with cash register stations cobbled together from two-by-fours and chicken wire by high-school kids. Yet those are the production values their Web payment screen projects.
Every customer interface affects your brand. It doesn't matter how solid your storefront is if your Web site is an obviously under-funded backwater. It says, “We pay attention to what you see until you've bought something. After that, meh.”
But wait, there's more!
The lazy UI is one thing, but it gets worse. Which leads to a major point I want to make. I could easily improve this UI, as could any competent designer, but the user experience would still be fundamentally broken. And this is where UX starts way before UI, with the requirements. Notice anything missing? I can pay with a different account, but I can't choose the payment method that is universal across the Web:
Credit cards.
Oops. No card payments. If you are paying a Nebraska Furniture Mart account, you cannot pay with a card. You have to give them your bank account number. That's the big one, and it's a user experience problem that no amount of visual design can solve. It was created at the business analysis stage, and it would have to be solved at the business analysis stage.
Imagine walking up to the check-out stations at any store and being told you can't pay by card. Enough said.
Executive takeaway: This is why you have to include UX in your business analysis and feature-function decisions. By the time bad product management decisions go live, your business has egg on its face, and it'll take expensive re-coding and redesign to get rid of it.
How does this happen?
As far as the perfect storm of bad UI design goes, I can guarantee you there's a very simple cause: The Web site is an under-funded backwater. Someone thinks Web sites require only programming skills, and so NFM saved money by not putting a designer and a copywriter on the project, let alone a UX professional. The results are there for the world to see.
But how did the major blooper, no card payments, come about?
“But, Per,” you might say, “if these are payments toward an installment account, should we allow customers to pay with credit? That's paying a credit account from another credit account.” Well, no, it's not, if I, like most people, pay with a debit card. Even if I were to use a credit card, should that not be my problem? It's hard to imagine that this could be a valid business or legal reason. When you buy a cell phone on installments, that's a credit account, yet no provider would say you can't use a credit card to pay your monthly bill. Can I make my car payment with a credit card? Yes. But not a couch purchased at NFM?
Or, maybe there is a cost-savings effort involved. Are the card companies demanding too much of a cut? I don't know, but what I do know is I can pay with a card everywhere else, so when someone doesn't allow it there's a huge, glaring disconnect. Why isn't this a problem for everyone else? Even more to the point, why can I walk up to this business's own customer service counter and pay with a card, but not use the very same card on their site? And, if there really were a problem with card companies taking a cut, why not come out and say that on the site so we're all on the same page? Instead, there is no explanation. What you have is a business whose brand just took a hit, as would yours. It's as if you showed up to do a sales presentation in a sharp suit but with the top of your underwear poking out in the back.
Don't be like Nebraska Furniture Mart.
