Comments on: Invalid State Error: What’s a Poor Person to Do?

By: Roberto

Roberto — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:48:58 +0000

A nightmare. I got the “invalid state” error when completing my purchase and noticed particularly that at the end it says “Please start over”, which I did; twice. Ended up buying the tickets 3 times. I called their call center and all I could get was a promise of a refund for the 2 extra ones WHICH MIGHT TAKE UP TO 60 DAYS!, but they don’t seem to care too much. I wonder how often this happens. I notice that some of the messages in this forum are over a year old. One would think that by now AA would have figured out a solution to this. Outrageous.

By: Elsa Devera

Elsa Devera — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:01:54 +0000

Hey… I get this error every time I try to make a reservation and purchase it on AA.com and I have been told by their technical people that there is nothing they can do. I cannot go back to the ticket that I purchased ever again, which presents a problem. I cannot reprint the ticket receipt and I cannot change the reservation name either. I simply cannot do anything at all. Their tech guy told me to use another browser, because my problem is due to Internet Explorer, which I run under Windows 2000. Apparently AA.com does not have a real response, all they say is that if they fix the problem for my case, everyone else will not be able to access AA.com.

I cannot believe this is true!

By: Ben Gilman

Ben Gilman — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:38:46 +0000

For me it’s exactly the sort of thing that would be turned up in a first round of sense-checking an application. In the American Airlines example at least it’s a result of a technical error. In my experience these situations are as regularly present in working applications as they are in broken ones.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:40:38 +0000

Garret, nice comment. I checked out that site and interstingly, their home page welcomes you with a list of supported browsers on the right-hand-side. It’s like an exclusive country club for browsers a kind-of virtual xenophobia and very 1996-like. thanks for pointing it out

By: Samantha LeVan

Samantha LeVan — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:49:37 +0000

Preventable errors topped with horrible error message writing. Pretty pitiful. My favorite is the one about having multiple browser windows open. Does that mean I can’t have my gmail in another window? Likely they are talking about instances of their own site, but they fail to communicate this with their users.

Other websites let you have multiple instances. Not efficient workflow, but possible.

By: Tree

Tree — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:30:01 +0000

You’ll find this interesting.

The other day I was withdrawing money from an ATM when I noticed a leaflet stuck on the door which basically explained all the error codes that one could receive while interacting with the ATM.

Better than nothing at all though it could have been located on the wall behind the ATM to increase effectiveness, but was rather amusing none the less.

By: John Pash

John Pash — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:28:53 +0000

I’ve had this exact thing happen to me once on the Eurostar website. I was told to start over, so I did. I ended up buying two tickets. After talking with them on the phone, they assured me I would only be charged for one ticket (I wasn’t) and there would be no problem traveling. Well, they canceled both tickets and charged me for both!

This entire scenario was caused by my “incorrect use” of the back button. I’m finding out that it’s a good policy to never use the back button when trying to buy something online.

By: Aldra

Aldra — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:23:08 +0000

There is no such thing as “Incorrect use of browser’s Back button”, just badly designed web apps.
It may as well have said “User error. You probably messed up in some way.”

By: Garrett Nafzinger

Garrett Nafzinger — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:02:00 +0000

Hi, Jared. Great article! I’m amazed how often I come across these types of issues. Here’s one from shopouraisles.com. They were gleeful to inform me, I was using an “incorrect web browser” (Safari).
http://www.usablewebb.com/images/incorrect-web-browser.png