Pet usability peeves

Happy New Year to all. Having just had a few excessively frustrating experiences online, I thought I would list my top usability peeves and try and keep track of improvements over the coming year. In no particular order, then:

- Any site that forces the user to watch animations without providing a "skip" option, with the worst offenders being those with music or speech that you can't turn off (actually this has to be one of the top peeves. God I hate those.)

- Sites that use technology that is liable if not highly likely to be blocked by firewalls. This results in users being presented with a blank page for the home page...I came across a site recently where part of the home page was considered by my firewall to be a pop-up, so that the name, brand logo, order phone line and welcome message were blocked; another one where the shopping cart did not appear and on which there was no other link to it (!)

- Sites that use bandwidth heavy items on the home page so that it does not load instantly, or loads in pieces.

- Sites that are not compatible with all the standard browsers (I use Firefox: surprising the number of times I have to switch to IE to get something to work properly) and O/Ss, including past and latest versions

- Sites that force you to create an account before you can buy anything, rather than letting you buy and then offering the option of saving your info. I've got quite a few "dormant accounts" out there, and I don't like knowing that my info is out there but there's not much I can do short of some time-consuming emailing and tracking.

- Sites that are not upfront about prices, P&P, any additional charges (such as taxes and duties one may be liable to pay when ordering from another economic zone e.g. US/Europe), resulting in sticker shock when you get to payment, or the delivery man actually holding the package ransom.

- Sites with poor search capabilities (especially important when there are a lot of products)

- Sites that send you too many emails and too many catalogs (you may opt in to receive these but that does not mean you want a daily special offer...or a weekly catalog...)

- Sites where customer service is lousy: either there is no phone number (or there is but it goes to an answering machine which does not tell you the delay for a call-back) or no internationally compatible phone number; or there is just a form (no email), or there is an email -but there is no automated response confirming your message has been recieved and providing a response delay.

- Related to the above, sites where customer service does not communicate after your purchase and you have to follow-up. They should tell you when an item ships and with what method and what the delay should be, so that you are aware of what to expect. I've had to follow up too many times on items that didn't arrive which turned out not to have been sent yet because there was a problem with stock/supplier/intern made a mistake and order did not go through/you name it...

- Sites that do not clearly provide shipping policy, or returns policy, or exchange policy.

I could go on but this is getting tedious. Too many companies rely on the fact they have (or believe they have) little or no competition to opt out of usability completely, too many companies have not yet twigged that long term, the way to retain and develop your customer base is to keep them happy by not only providing good products and services but also by making the experience of acquiring them a good one.

And too many users (including myself) are finding that putting up with these failures is still better for a lot of purchases than blindly trekking all over town (if you live in a large one) in search of one small item...that you may not even find.

And so it goes on.

Next I will provide a list of top quality experiences online...