How not to design a website – Travelodge

I travel a lot and use Travelodge because it is cheap and relatively easy but their website really annoys me.

The booking form has an “I accept your terms and conditions” checkbox. If you submit the form before ticking the box the site clears your credit card details and then asks to type them in again. Surely the designer could have used bit of JavaScript to disable the submission button until the mandatory fields were complete?

It gets worse. The site has no way to complain about broken functionality so I shall vent my anger in public. If you going to not bother doing any user testing or instrumenting your site at least allow users to tell you when it is not working.

I will try Premier Inn next time, they might be better.

Postscript – 23rd May 2012

Although it is not possible to contact Travelodge about the website design when I had a problem with a booking I was able to defeat the online “the answer to your question is this” system and get a message to a real person who fixed the booking in a few hours.

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About Dr James Bayley

If you would like chat please contact me. My consultancy ElephantPM provides project management services including FogBugz training, project start-up and troubleshooting. Having developed successful software products for other people I decided to create my own and Keyapt SMS, which was created with Chris Saltmarsh is the first. You can follow me at blog.jamesbayley.com and @ElephantPM on Twitter.

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One Response to How not to design a website – Travelodge

Peter Abrahams says:

April 30, 2012 at 10:54

James
I could not agree more. I have seen lots of sites that grey out the submit until the mandatory fields are complet.

The need for feedback is even more important. I have helped author two reports on accessibility ‘Seven steps to accessible web sites’ and ‘seven steps to accessible mobile apps’ see http://www.onevoiceict.org/tools/tools . In both cases one of the early steps is to provide a feedback mechanism.