DesignMarketing & CommunicationsUsability
If your website is broken, fix it.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Filed under Design, Marketing & Communications, Usability
Leave a comment
In the age of social networking, organizations can’t afford to ignore errors on their websites. Some visitor will inevitably point it out, which can lead to an embarrassing situation. Not long ago, I was that visitor.
I was checking a friend’s flight details for him on the website for the Canadian airline WestJet. According to the website, in order to check your flight details online, you need to log in to your WestJet Profile. This friend of mine didn’t have such a profile yet, so I looked into creating one for him. There was an FAQ section detailing how to sign up for a profile. These were the instructions:
“Under the My WestJet drop-down menu, click on something [sic] and follow the prompts.”
I grabbed a screen shot:
Of course, the actual label for the link was not something, but Sign-up.
Problem number one here is that this error was allowed to slip through. Before this page was posted, someone should have proof-read it for quality control. Now maybe someone did and just made a mistake, which is fine; that happens to all of us. But there’s still problem number two…
When I saw this, I called them on it, posting a tweet about it. To their credit, WestJet posted a reply to my tweet promptly. The problem was - as they explained - they had planned to fix the error “in the next update.” I repeatedly checked the page for days after, and it hadn’t been fixed until more than a week later.
A big company like WestJet should not have to wait until “the next update” to fix a simple type-o. If the site is properly built and maintained, a content author should have been able to immediately log in and correct the error in seconds. This is particularly important since the error was on an FAQ page, which is presumably visited often by customers, and pertained to usability.
The beauty of websites is that changes to them are instant. They’re not like printed materials in which everything is final. Make sure your organization takes advantage of that feature: Have a system in place whereby if a problem arises you can nip it in the bud.
