Tonight I had a mission - to buy toner for my printer, so I can print articles for uni to write my assignment.

I didn’t know who to buy from, so Googled.

Here’s what happened:

Site 1 - I found the product and the price and could add it to my basket. But, I couldn’t go to my basket to complete the purchase.

Site 2 - this was a paper catalogue online, with no links to any other page. Black text on a grey image - not easy to read.

Site 3 - Another paper catalogue, with no logo (so I had no idea who the site was). No links to the home page.

Site 4 - IE decided to be silly and wouldn’t display images. The site home page was full of images, with no text, and no alt text … so I couldn’t see what the site contained.

Site 5 - had a list of items, and physical locations of shops that sold them, but no logo and no way to move off the page.

Back to site 1 home page…

I finally found a shopping cart item and went to the cart. To learn about shipping, I had to click a link in the middle frame, which opened a new navigator in the left frame, which I had to click on to get a new page in the middle frame. After reading about shipping, I couldn’t find the shopping cart, so had to go back to the home page.

OK…clicked on ‘continue’, and the site tried to download a .exe file to my PC. Clicking cancel allowed me to continue. Then I had to fill in a form, only to find that I couldn’t ship to a PO Box (and I live in the country with a roadside mailbox)…so the toner is going to a friend in town.

I finally got to choose a shipping option. No problem here.

I got to the credit card screen and the shipping had not been added into my order. Oh well…

Finally submitted the order, and got a confirmation number, but I couldn’t print it as I have no toner, and couldn’t save the page (who knows why). Luckily, they did send me a confirmation email.

What a drama. Surely it shouldn’t be this hard to order some toner.

Someone needs to do some usability testing…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 7th, 2002 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Usability evaluation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.