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Usability Watch - Why can’t I do what I want to do!?!

I’ve been shopping round for a new car recently and that means I inevitably have to get some (outrageous) insurance quotes. In the UK there’s a website called confused.com which is basically a screen scraper service that goes around multiple companies and is meant to get you the cheapest quote. Strangely, the cheapest quote I got from them was about the same as the most expensive quote I got when I went through the process manually, but that’s for another day.

On the the point! I’ve used the site before to get quotes, last time I was looking for a car in fact, so I duly signed in using my details. Upon sign in, I was presented with the following screenConfused.com welcome page you can see to the right. So why is this such a poor screen? Well, put yourself in my shoes, I hadn’t visited the site in a while and was coming back to get a new quote. With that in mind, what’s missing from that screen? Thats right, it seems as though all I can do is visit and view existing quotes. So where do we go from here? I assumed this was just because I was revisiting and I had outstanding quotes, so I hit “Previous” in search of a more usefull opening screen, but no, nothing, nada. Turns out, that if you want to create a new quote, you have to go and visit one of your existing quotes. Why? This is the sort of interface and usability madness that drives me mad, excuse the pun. To put it simply, I’m just as likely to want to create a new quote as revisit an old one, so those options should be on par. The other option that should clearly be available is to update my details. Hell, I want to input my details once and then just reuse them over and over. At the moment, while it pre-populates the fields with your pre-entered details, theres no way to just choose a car and hit submit. With the amount of information some insurers ask for, it would save some serious time, and just seems like common sense.

This post was written on Thursday, April 26th 2007 by Simon T and has been categorised under Usability Watch. The trackback URL is here or you could add a response. If you really want to you can Digg Story or add it to del.icio.us, Technorati Cosmos, Blinklist, furl or Reddit.

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