Just let me log in!

I know that I said this post would involve a door, but I haven’t had time to go snap the photos for that entry.

Instead, let’s look at how a website can make you go through needless pain for the privilege of sending them money.

Last night, I wanted to order with a national pizza chain. So I went to their website and was presented with their homepage.

 There is an “Order Online” button with a big, inviting button. The assumption is that you click the button and would be taken to the log-in screen. Since I have a log-in with them, I click the button. Instead of a log-in screen I get this screen:

Why is the site asking for my location? Shouldn’t I log in and the system would know where my store is?

So, I enter my zip code and am rewarded with this screen:

Now, please note the “Order Online” link… the same link that I clicked two pages ago. Why am I being asked for this yet again? And why is it so small?

Click the link and you get:

 FINALLY, an honest-to-goodness log-in screen.

Now I can enter my email and password and start ordering my delicious pizza.

Now, let's talk about how this should have worked.

When I clicked the “Order Online” button on the home page it should have given me the opportunity to log in. On the order page I would enter the delivery address. The system would then verify that this address is serviced by my stored location. If not, it would advise me that there is a closer location and my pizza would be delivered from that location instead.

LESSON LEARNED:  When a user wants to log into your system, don’t make them leap through hoops. Get them into your system first and then take it from there. 

And so it begins...

Let me begin by answering the question that I know is running through your mind.

“Red Paint?”

Here’s a riddle for you:  “What is red and smells like blue paint?”

If you ask most adults that question, they will stare at you for a second and then start racking their brains, coming up with one convoluted answer after another.  “A fire truck painted blue and immediately washed off” was a personal favorite.

I then asked my 11-year-old daughter the same question one night when I was bringing her a drink of water. She looked up at me with big, tired eyes and said “Duh, red paint daddy” and immediately returned to watching cartoons before going to sleep.

The point of this story?  As adults we tend to overcomplicate things. We try to be too clever. Kids just look for the simplest answer. As adults, we can learn a lot from that lesson, especially in our working lives.

We see a problem and we try to come up with the most elaborate, complicated solution imaginable. This may happen intentionally or by accident, such as because of “design by committee” where there is no central theme and the result is a hodge-podge of parts stuck together.

Naturally, the most egregious examples of this are on the Internet. We’ve all been to sites that have no identifiable navigational structure. Sites that as soon as you take four steps into it you have no idea where you are or how you got there. Sites that seem to be designed to confuse the user into submission.

In my fifteen years of design experience, I have learned several important lessons. The biggest was the “Well duh” principal. I would get a new project, start off with an idea and keep playing with it, tweaking this part or that until that little light bulb went off above my head. It wasn’t until I thought “Well duh, how else COULD you do this?” and felt like an idiot for not seeing the most obvious solution that I knew I was done. It was my "Well, duh" moment.

I couldn’t name a blog “Well, duh”… so welcome to Red Paint.

This blog will be a discussion of the world and how we interact with it. It will also cover the tools that we use to create those interactions. True, there will be a heavy emphasis on the online part of the world, but it won’t be limited to that. In fact, the next post will be about something as simple as the color of a door.

Feel free to contact me at redpaintblog@gmail.com or follow me on twitter at @redpaintblog.