Philip Gamble: freeg131

For those of you who don’t know Scream is a brand of pubs marketed at students in the UK owned by major pub group Mitchells & Butlers. There are a couple of Scream pubs in Birmingham where I am at University.

They have a ‘Yellow Card’ promotional scheme where students can purchase a credit card sized discount card for £1 which saves you money on some drinks.

Today Scream Pubs asked their 26,000 Facebook followers “How much d’you reckon you’ve saved with your Yellow Card?”. Over half the responses are currently negative!

Quite the opposite from the Sarah Palin delete negative comments strategy!

It will be interesting to see if they leave these comments on or delete them.

Three examples of poor websites that I’ve come across in the past few weeks.  A selection of poor usability and common sense oversights which should never have gone live.

The first is the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign, a website in favour of the Alternative Vote system for electing MPs.  Does the homepage even mention the AV system – no.  Does the site explain what AV is or give examples of how it is fairer than the existing first past the post system –  no.

There are some obviously fake hotel reviews on a local WhatsIn[InsertNameOfTownHere].co.uk site. You will need to click on the reviews tab to see them. All the reviews give the hotel in question 5 stars, all of them are highly positive with no criticisms whatsoever and the first 5 reviews are all posted by ‘anonymous’ within 12 minutes of each other.

The last example is perhaps the most surprising given it comes from a well known high street brand.

It involves the Boots store locator, accessible at the following SEO and user unfriendly URL: http://www.boots.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/StoreLocator?requiredAction=displayStoreLookupPage&displayView=StoreLookupView&langId=-1&storeId=10052&catalogId=11051

So I do as suggested and enter my home town Watford into the search box and hit enter. Up comes the following page.

Three things are wrong with this. First it is screaming “error” at me – why? I entered the name of my town as I was asked to, it isn’t my fault that Boots doesn’t know where I mean. A user friendly “Sorry, please clarify which town you mean” or similar message could easily be put up to address this nicely.

Second – the message states that fields containing “errors” have been “marked in red”.  No fields are red.

Third – I entered the exact text it suggested on the search page! If the case they recommend works this badly it doesn’t bode well.

Only once I’d reached this screen and was trying to work out how I was supposed to confirm my selection of the correct Watford from the drop down list did I notice the expandable form area, marked with the universal symbol for making something bigger –  a subtraction sign.

The manual search button (which was also on the first page) I needed to press to advance to the next page  is located so far away from the point of data entry that until now I had not seen it.

Medway council are spending their council tax payers money to encourage me to recycle by advertising on Facebook.

I have seen the ad on the left several times over the past few days linking to the recycling section of the council website.

Why?  I don’t live in or anywhere near Medway.  Facebook profiles contain lots of demographic information to which advertising campaigns can easily be targeted so the fact that it is showing to me seems unforgivable.  I did once visit Chatham Docks though and watched as the Tour de France passed through!

The houses are pretty affordable though and Ebbsfleet International to St Pancras is a 20 minute train journey. I’ll remember that.

Spotify is brilliant. I’ve been using it for over a year now and was a premium subscriber for a good few months before they released the cheaper ‘unlimited’ package.

The idea is great (effectively a cross between iTunes and last.fm which I used in the early 2000s and notice has become more popular over the last couple of years). You can find most music you want on it from current hits to the things my parents like and children’s TV themes.

One thing that began sometime with in the last month which I find immensely annoying however is a prompt to “share Spotify” with my “friends and family” every single time I load up the program (i.e. every day). It appears I’m not the only one annoyed at this.

Quick update on the Guru.com experiment – It didn’t happen.

I opted for a $50 bid and made the payment via PayPal from a different location than normal and it its wisdom PayPal decided that the payment was suspicious and the transaction was put on hold. I went through the verification process as requested which required me to re-enter my bank details and take a call from their computerised voice but the payment has now been on hold for two and a half weeks.

“Inquiry by PayPal Temporary Hold” and “Being Reviewed by PayPal” are not things you would like to see in your account. “Documentation received from seller” has appeared four times in the event time-line and I have given PayPal everything they have asked for so I have no idea why they are still holding my money.

I wouldn’t mind if they refused the transaction and gave me back the funds so I could go elsewhere or if they let the transaction through but this limbo does no one any good. My project is on hold, the freelancer and Guru have been messed around and worst of all they probably both think this is down to something I have done wrong.

Naturally when they didn’t receive my payment Guru suspended my account (I suspect they get a fair amount of chancers using hacked/stolen/fraudulent payment accounts).

The last action from PayPal was over a week ago. Pathetic, yet PayPal is so widely accepted that I will have to continue to use it.