Send a text message. That’s the sole purpose of this rather large screenshot, taken from o2.ie. The average Nokia phone from 5 years ago does a far cleaner and clearer job in a tiny fraction of the real estate. This is featuritis at it’s worst.
In one of his books, Edward Tufte wrote that “Clutter and overload are not attributes of information, they are a failure of design“. I can think of no better example of this, than what I see above.
A heap of unnecessary features, preceded by 5 tabs of junk. Ridiculous labelling, misleading icons, a dropdown saying “Albania”, and a default action of “Save as draft” rather than, say, Send Message. What were they thinking?
To top it off, an interruption dialogue opens in a new window which simply says “Your message has been sent”.
O2 are the only provider of the iPhone in Ireland at the moment. It’s a shame they didn’t look at that SMS application there before designing the above catastrophe.
13 Comments
Great post. I’ve always believe that O2 and companies like them need to wake up. This looks like something designed my their marketing department, handed off to graphic design and just shoved in a developers face.
I think systems fall flat on their arse when they try to do too many things poorly instead of doing what users really want really well.
I think o2 need to work on their performance and reliability issues too. Lord knows what sort of overheads they must be incurring on their databases with all them gimmicks.
Posted by Name at 2:28 pm on 3 February, 2009.
Completely agree. The older interface was actually better than the current one.
Posted by Anthony McG at 3:03 pm on 3 February, 2009.
I’ve always been amazed by the pathetically poor standard of web based SMS services. The telcos themselves seem to be the worst offenders. The conspiracy theorist in me likes to believe that it’s due to them not wanting to make their ‘free SMS online’ services good enough to actually use, the cynic in me prefers Hanlon’s razor! The world needs a GMail for SMS.
Posted by Name at 4:49 pm on 3 February, 2009.
This is a recent enough change that they made. The service before hand wasn’t this bad.
Posted by Name at 4:57 pm on 3 February, 2009.
In fairness they are actually happier if you DON’T use webtext. Ireland didn’t get to #2 in the ARPU charts worldwide by making it easy for you to skip the 11c tax on SMS
Posted by Colm at 5:40 pm on 3 February, 2009.
to say that o2.ie really grind my gears on a daily basis would be quite an understatement
Posted by Dooley at 10:27 am on 4 February, 2009.
Comment
Posted by Name at 4:39 pm on 7 February, 2009.
Actually, SMS app is far from being the best designed iPhone application. The text input field is ridiculously small and just like my friends, I found myself typing the message into the field meant for recipients more than once.
Unless you’ve opened the app from a contact in address book, it should be message first, recipient(s) second IMO.
Initial app didn’t even have the option to send to multiple recipients. Message receipts still aren’t incorporated.
Posted by Rafal at 9:31 pm on 14 February, 2009.
Rafal,
I didn’t say that SMS was the best designed app on the iPhone - I said that the o2 developers could learn a thing or two from it, namely simplicity.
Des
Posted by Des Traynor at 12:52 am on 16 February, 2009.
Is there an award for Ireland’s worst website? 02.ie would get my nomination year after year.
Posted by Mur at 11:47 am on 20 February, 2009.
Agree wholeheartedly. The new webtext interface and the O2 website in general are appalling. How they’ve managed to make something so simple appear so difficult is quite a feat.
Posted by Ciaran McGrath at 2:10 pm on 27 February, 2009.
Thank God it’s not just me. I left O2 for Vodafone recently because of this - after sending constructive comments to their customer support void. I spoke at length with one support individual who thought it was normal to have all contacts in my phones address book as “firstname lastname” and that it would only take a few minutes for me to “fix my address book”. Fix your own site first O2!
Posted by Matthew Ovington at 9:35 pm on 17 March, 2009.
O2’s website is terrible. I send all my web text’s from my iPod Touch using Eirtext. Not the best designed program either, not going to compete against SMS app for iPhone users, but certainly better than that catastrophe O2 call a website. Then if you look at the URLs the site uses. They’re far more complicated than MSDN, despite MSDN having about a 1000 times more information.
And to think, this is AFTER a major redesign for the site. They’ve got another coming according to the front page. What are they changing? The header and footer. They’ve got more serious problems than the header and footer.
Posted by Tony at 11:14 am on 15 April, 2009.