Argos fans we're not 16 Jul 2008

You may remember Bill Gates' rant on Windows' usability late last month. Well, the rising heat of England's summer (and a recent air-conditioning crisis in our offices) pushed me to a similar edge recently.

In an effort to cool things down a little, in the hotbed that is Etre Towers, I set about ordering some fans online yesterday. Our office supplies company was out of stock, so I visited the website of that great British institution, Argos (where you can generally find pretty much anything you want at a price you're willing to pay).

My experience wasn't quite as frustrating as Bill's, though I was put out by a few of the just plain silly usability issues that were present throughout Argos' site. Frustrating little things, like:

• Dodgy character encoding;
• Incomplete breadcrumbs (which made "backing up" the navigation hierarchy a challenge);
• Mis-matched measurement standards (sometimes metric, sometimes imperial);
• A shopping cart that required a lot more than just a second-glance;
• Ambiguous delivery options;
• Poorly considered processes that threw me back to the shopping cart page when I said I wanted to go somewhere else;
• And on and on the list goes...

(Heaven forbid you use your browser back button on Argos' site... It's an "Empty shopping cart" devil-button in disguise.)

I got there in the end, so clearly none of these issues were show-stoppers (for me, at any rate). And our team now eagerly awaits the imminent arrival of cooler times at work! Still, I thought I'd take the time to show you a few of the issues I encountered in the video snippet below (by way of my rant for the summer). It was recorded after I successfully placed my order - so I had already mastered a few of the challenges by this stage.

As the sun soars ever higher in the sky over England, are there any usability rants that you want to get off your chest?