Trunk Media

2 Degrees usability observations

15 August 2010

I’m not a fan of 2degrees website. Compared to the effort they’ve put into their television adverts, the website is quite visually unappealing. Because Vodafone NZ insists on charging a ridiculous sum to have a spare sim card I have a couple of 2degrees sims that I use for the extra mobile phones I have for smart phone development. I needed to keep them topped up so I went to sign in to 2degree’s website. What I found was the typical lazy web development we seem to have become blessed with lately.

English speakers read left to right, top to bottom to they would've filled in their mobile number before getting to the signup button

Here I have marked up exactly how most people would read this page. As such, I’ve already filled in my mobile number (deleted here) by the time I get to the sign up button. So, when I click signup, I would expect my number to be remembered.

They've forgotten my mobile number and got the next & cancel buttons backwards

It’s trivial to carry through the mobile number through from the previous page and it’s what a good web developer would do without being asked to and it’s something a good web project manager would demand without the client asking. It’s not the clients job to know good usability, that’s the development companies job and it seems here that 2degrees has been let down by their development team.

What’s with the buttons at the bottom too? Apart from the fact the cancel button is on the wrong side, do they really need one? Is the process so complex that you need to cancel it? Would not a link to somewhere more appropriate been better? With no colour differentiation between next and cancel and the cancel being in the same place as the next should be I can imagine some users putting in their mobile number for a second time only to hit cancel by mistake further infuriating them. Why risk the chance of upsetting your users?

I continued on with the signup and it was the same thing the whole way through. The one screen I thought was the worst though was the “your details” screen. It’s already partially completed but has a load of required field asterisks that are empty. So, if you hit save, you come up with errors meaning you can’t incrementally add fields, you must fill in the whole field. This makes no sense as the form previously only had one value in it but now if you want to add anything, you must complete the entire form and most people won’t bother. Huge mistake and poor usability and exactly inline with what I’ve come to expect from 2degree’s website.

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