It's only mine because it holds my suitcase.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

An object lesson in awful site design - by Microsoft

My Xbox is broken. No surprise there. It's happened before and it'll happen again. It's all part of the Microsoft experience. But that's not my gripe. My gripe is, as indicated in the subject, about site navigation. You see, I'd like to know the status of my repair, so off I trundle to xbox.com.


Look! There's a button marked "Check Repair Status", in a dropdown right under the support tab. Clicking it does not, however, allow me to check my repair status. That's okay, because now there's a link called "Check Repair Status" on the left navigation bar, under console management.


I'll just click that. Surely doing so will display my repair status? Nope. But that's okay. Now there's a blue button in the middle of my screen that says "Check Repair Status".


I click it. Finally! My repair status!


My repair is. . .in progress. Not a big surprise, I suppose, but after all that buildup I would have hoped for something a bit more exciting.