User Interface Engineering

A while back, I praised some of BestWestern.com’s clever design implementations (See how they do Type-ahead auto-completion and automagic field entry.)

However, not everything is perfect over at BestWestern.com.

Best Western offers its regular customers a wonderful loyalty program. Like many hotels, stay frequently and you can earn free nights.

Let’s say you’ve piled up a bunch of those magic reward points and you now want to treat yourself to a little family vacation. Since you regularly book your room on BestWestern.com, it’s likely you’d expect it to be just as easy to redeem the rewards there, right? Wrong.

BestWestern.com hasn’t implemented reward redemption yet. It’s coming, it’s just not there yet.

But how would a loyal customer know that? It’s very possible a regular user would search the site for several minutes, thinking the functionality must be there. After all, they’ve done such a good job on the reservation portion, how could they leave that part out?

For a user who does search the site far-and-wide for functionality they will never find, the only outcome is frustration. They’ve wasted time and potentially have the nagging feeling they just aren’t smart enough to find it. Feeling stupid and frustrated are not how you want to leave your customer hanging, is it?

What’s the alternative? After all, Best Western doesn’t have the capability to reserve rewards stays yet.

Well, in fact they do, just not on the site.

What would happen if Best Western had a prominent link near the reservation area saying something like, “Reserve Your Room Using Your Reserve Points”? Users could find the link easily. Clicking on it would send them to instructions on how to book their reward stay using Best Western’s call center.

Wouldn’t that be a bait-and-switch: promising the functionality online, then sending the user to the phone to complete the functionality? Maybe. However, would it be less frustrating for the user to find out quickly they need to call the 800 number or to fruitlessly search the site for functionality that isn’t to be found?

I’m sure the copywriters at BestWestern.com could easily conjure up a nicely contrite explanation, such as “We’re sorry, but today you can’t reserve reward stays on our site. It’s a feature we plan to add soon, but we’re just not ready to roll it out yet. In the meantime, there’s an army of happy customer service representatives, just waiting to make your reward stay the best possible. Just call them at 800-XXX-XXXX and they’ll make your reservation immediately.” (Ok, I’m not a great copywriter, but you get the idea.)

What unimplemented features do you need to advertise on your site?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.