On the Floor

Last night I had an experience which once again emphasized the wretched state of websites developed by large Canadian corporations.

In this case, it's the website for Pizza Pizza, and all I was trying to do was order a pizza online.

If you're not from Canada, especially Ontario, you may not be familiar with this chain, but they're the market leader in Ontario with over 500 locations, and they're publicly traded. Their pizza is quite good, and although I typically prefer ordering from local independent restaurants, not all of them deliver, so Pizza Pizza works when you're in a pinch.

All in all, a big company with lots of money that provides a quality product: the kind of corporation that ought to have a really well-designed, well-executed way to order their product online.

How wrong I was. Here's my experience in a nutshell:

1. Arrive at website, click 'Order'. I'm told I have to create an account. Stupid move already: there's no good reason to require an account for online orders unless you're ordering an online membership of some kind, and requiring account creation has a marked negative effect on conversions. But I'm hungry and the kids are crabby, so I create an account.
2. Immediately after creating an account, I'm redirected to a page that says 'Session expired. Please login again.' Odd system, I think, but okay.
3. I log back in and I proceed to creating my order. It's not the most attractive interface, but it works. I've got all my toppings selected and ready to go, and I'm ready to proceed to checkout, when suddenly: "Session expired"! Again! This is after being on the website for all of four minutes.
4. Maybe that was just bad luck, I think - maybe their system expires sessions once every X hours and my session was at a bad time. Kids are screaming. Wife is asking me why I don't just call. "Hang on," I say. I start over. If I can just perform my order really quickly, maybe I'll be okay...
5. I start over, fill out my order at lightning speed, fill in my credit card information to pay online, submit the order, and wham, session expired, AGAIN. You have got to be kidding me! Now I'm thinking, "fool me once, shame on you, etc.", but the problem is that I had filled out all my credit card details and submitted them. So now I don't know if I was charged or not, and whether or not my pizza is on its way. Once again I login. I manage to find my order, which is "incomplete". I retrieve it, try to pay online, my card is rejected (probably because of the previous attempt, or something), so I choose to pay at the door, and finally, my pizza is on its way (which I pay for using the same card that was rejected online).

What an appalling waste of time. But I'm the kind of web developer that always point out website issues so they can be fixed, so I go and find their contact form and write out this helpful message:

Your website's session management is broken. I'm a web developer, and while placing an order (rapidly, I might add), I was told my session had expired four times! Including one time immediately after I submitted my order, complete with credit card information. You need to fix this, because it's costing you a lot of money. More details, email: EMAIL ADDRESS.

Helpful, right? I submit this form and I end up on on this page with this message: "Could not send email."

Their web developers are apparently so bad they can't even design a contact form that works.

Here's another example. We often shop at a local grocery store chain called Fortinos. (Side note: when you visit their website, it forces you to choose your location, starting with selecting your province - but they only have stores in a single province, Ontario, so what's the point of that?)

They process photos in the store under the brand PhotoLab. I've processed photos there since my early twenties (over a decade ago) and at some point, probably around 2005, they started offering online photo processing.

And it was excellent: really quite straightforward and easy to use, relying on just standard form uploads to get the job done. We processed a ton of photos through this service, and would pick them up at the grocery store, which was very convenient.

Then, in 2008, they "redesigned" it and switched to a Java applet, and it went from functional and useful to outright terrible. So terrible, that even as a technologically proficient web developer, I found it impossible to actually upload photos and place an order. Here's part of the email I sent to them about it in April 2008 (as always, I was trying to help):

I'm sure the developers of your new photo uploader applet worked hard, and as a developer myself, I almost hate to say this, but here it is anyway: your new photo applet for uploading photographs is terrible.

Previously, my wife, who is above-average when it comes to her computer skills and frequents all of the usual web applications you might expect (Yahoo Mail, Facebook, etc.), had no trouble whatsoever ordering photos online. She ordered lots of photos all of the time, particularly since we have a young baby who we photograph like crazy. Many visits to Fortinos for groceries also entailed picking up an envelope of photos.

Some time ago she started complaining to me that the uploader had changed and that she was having difficulty with it. As a result she has not placed any photo orders since Christmas. Today, I told her I would help her with uploading the photos.

I did not anticipate that it would be terribly difficult. I was wrong. The applet is slow. It's hard to navigate. The interface and behaviour is totally unintuitive.

For example, suppose you've uploaded 30 pictures (a difficult process), creating a paginated list of photos. Then you want to add them to your cart. If you hit Select All and add them, only the ones on the page where you've hit Select All are actually added, so when you go to your cart to specify quantities, many of the photos you are expecting are not there. However, if you choose Select All and then delete them, ALL of them are deleted, NOT just the ones on the page. This behaviour is contradictory.

I got some stock response from their support team, and we tried it a few more times in the weeks afterwards, but nothing changed. We started using a different, less convenient service, even though we didn't want to.

I checked back on their website a few months ago, and it was still the same, although checking it now, I see they've changed it again. Perhaps it's better now, but they kept their online service in this appalling state for at least three years, costing them untold amounts of money.

I see stuff like this on the websites of big Canadian companies all the time, and as a professional web developer who cares about producing quality work, this situation is totally unacceptable to me. I obsess about things like A/B testing how well a certain piece of text on a button works. These companies are producing websites that just don't work at all. It's crazy, it's embarrassing, and it's costing them millions.

Now, I know that in each of these cases, there are big back-end systems that have to dispatch orders, coordinate jobs, etc. Those systems are complex, I can't see them, and maybe they're really well-designed (although I wouldn't bet on it). But when it comes to the end-user experience, they suck, and they really need to get their acts together.