Design, web dev, photography, and the percolations of an Internet peregrinator.
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Expecting a delivery sent via DHL, and armed with a consignment number, I attempted to track the package.
Hilarity ensued as the code was not recognised by the fast track box on the front page, an actual pop up appearing to display an error: “Please enter a Number (only one) in the FastTrack Box.” Since my tracking number contained spaces, I stripped these out by hand, and resubmitted. This time I was redirected to the main tracking page, with a “No Result Found” error hidden away in the middle of the page.
I then turned to the On-line Tracking section of this page, which provided a drop down box to select which service the package had been sent with. All I knew was “DHL”, so I tried a couple (DHL Air Waybill, DHL Europlus), but to no avail.
Back up the page was a section titled More Tracking, with UK Domestic as the first link. I presumed that the store I’d bought from was also UK based, so I tried this. I then hit a blank page, with nothing but a retro Netscape favicon to distinguish the fact that I’d hit any kind of page at all. Was the page just broken? I dug into the source with Firebug, and noticed that it was assembled (badly) with javascript writing a frameset onto the page, with no body tag.
So that page looks blank in Firefox, but works perfectly in IE6 which doesn’t mind a webpage not having a body block. Once you’ve worked that all of this out, you can track your package with ease.
Or you could insist on UPS or FedEx the next time, which I would do, given the choice. They can both make websites that work, and have consignment numbering systems that allow them to determine the service used from the number itself.
At HP, if you’re not in the USA and you don’t think to inform them as such when you hit the homepage using the dropdown at the top (not a primary nav element by any means), you’re in for a big dose of inconvenient.
Typical usage path for HP website (at least, mine, a few minutes ago):
So you have to back out all the way to the homepage, switch to your country, and then navigate back down to the product you wanted.
Some companies will force you to specify your country or region through a splash page (ABit, Asus) which would have prevented this problem. A direct competitor to HP forgoes a splash, but instead makes the default country so much more obvious with a flag icon that stands out on the page.
Presumably, differences in regional catalogues make it too complicated to allow visitors to hop between regions from any page on the site, but this would clearly be the ideal. In the meantime, things like country selectors and age verification forms justify splash pages, because if you don’t ask for that information up front and your assumption turns out to be wrong, that will be a problem.
Ever dreampt of being able to play a melody and have a robot jam along with you by firing rubber balls at a giant marimba, while another blends in a haunting layer of harmonised crystal glass resonation and a third keeps the beat with an assortment of percussion?
Your day, my much disturbed friend, has finally come.
