I am sitting in a hotel room in Ireland waiting to get on a conference call. Why am I in Ireland? On Wednesday, I will giving a presentation at the XTech 2008 conference.

While I am sitting here, I figured I would create a Blog of these screen shots of various web pages. Mostly of things I couldn’t figure out or that were really badly designed.

What was I thinking?

This first screen shot comes from the AT&T site, which I needed to visit to reset the password to my account. The site was actually really easy to use, the problem was when I got to the security questions that I asked them to remember for me.

What is your favorite film? Huh? I am embarrassed to tell you how long I sat there looking at the screen trying to figure out what I originally thought of.

Lets see:

• Starwars or is it Star Wars
• Shawshank Redemption
• Pulp Fiction
• Mighty Aphrodite

Even the second question gave me trouble, no not because I don’t know where I met my wife (She might be reading). What was the spelling again?

Targeted Advertisements?

One of the things I thought the Web was supposed bring was targeted marketing. If you know more about me or where I am browsing, then I would be given ads, which would be relevant thereby driving more clicks and revenue for the advertiser and advertisee.

A couple weeks ago, I needed to download JBoss Seam and clicked on the download link from the JBoss site, which sent me to SourceForge. Not unusual, many companies use SourceForge as a distribution site. Why? Not sure, I don’t like SourceForge. The site has way to many clicks to get the damn software and the site design though a little better lately, let’s say, “Lack’s of a little usability.”

But back to the advertising. I get started on the download process and after three clicks, I come to this – “Dinner made easy” with Betty Crocker. Not sure how I fall into a Betty Crocker ad campaign and even less so for a news letter campaign. Maybe all JBoss Seam developers like cake and/or hamburger helper.

Like their enthusiasm!

I finally signed up for some Skype out minutes. At $0.02 a minute beats the pants off of my iPhone charge for international calls. When I was finished with the purchase of my minutes. That I am going to use on my conference call in 17 minutes. I got to this screen, where the header reads, “Nice, it worked!”. I like the fact that the language made it onto the final page. It is far more common that this would have been replaced with some overly polished, verbiage.

An Expensive Dinner?

I started using a new online expense report tool, which might have all the usability problems that has ever been created, all rolled into one place. The site uses almost no Ajax that I can tell and sometimes has three inner scrollbars that need to be operated in unison to make possible enter the data. Because there is little or no Ajax used; the site is consistently refreshing the page. But they tried to solve this by using iFrames which just makes the problem worse.

In the end, I did end up entering all my receipts for the first 4 months of the year. I tend to travel a lot to conferences and sales meeting so I had a stack of receipts about three inches thick. I finally finished battle the usability and screen refreshing, which even though the occur in the software feel like a low speed collision. All proud I raise my hands in the air and yell “Yeah”, just need to print out the report… Then I read the report, I entered the receipts into a single expense item labeled dinner. Not sure if a 4k dinner is in the travel policy.

Summary:

Great sites don’t just happen they take a lot of work to create, and I am not sure I have created one that I would say is truly great.

Bob (Buffone)