The Dear British Gas, you made me feel like I’m going (considerably more) insane.
A story of shitty UX in action.
Dear British Gas online team
I am trying to book an engineer visit to service my boiler
In My Account there is no option
This raises my question do I actually have HomeCare
I should do I only received a postcard telling me to book in an annual service recently
Right I got and open the horrendously outdated looking iPhone app please for the sake of everyone update this to iOS 7 styles rather than the now really old skeuomorphic 3D button styles yes that was about 3 years ago now
OK back to the story so when logging into the app I try to book a engineer visit
Hmm I have a message that I dont have HomeCare Okay perhaps I am loosing it and I actually dont have HomeCare
Right let me try and buy HomeCare for my home
Ooooh you have an offer for free Hive lights
Yes More shit I can ask Alexa to do for me I do love a bit of IoT
Oh OK now I have a message that I am already a HomeCare customer
Hmm this doesnt seem to stack up somehow
Some online services are telling me that I have an account and others are telling that I do not
Either I am loosing my tiny fucking mind here or something is wrong
OK let me check I’m using the right email address
Lets just do a search for British Gas in my email history
Ahh yes its the right email address OK I think this is you and not me
Phew one less trip to the doctors to get my mental health rectified there
OK so I slept on this thinking it could be something to do with a change request going in at the time of my log in
Oh dear nope its still you
Oh and another thing in your online account portal its looking a lot nicer btw good job there
It’s really hard to find HomeCare Sell it to me if I don’t have it promote it Its a great product
Youre selling me a Hive thermostat there sorry I already have Nest when Hive was a horrible looking product
You tell me that I am on a waiting list for a Smart Meter whoop
Actually though that’s a massive waste of screen real estate I cared when I thought I was going to get one now not so much well not at all if I am being honest
Can I make a suggestion Have a list of my products what I have and what I dont I feel like youve dumbed it down too much
Did you do some UX testing with your customers
OK I seem to keep going in circles with this boiler service thing Please would you mind looking into fixing it
Oh and another thing why can I not use punctuation insert question mark
I do understand the SQL injection thing but come on let me have basic punctuation pretty please
I wasnt told about not typing special characters and now my browser has lots of horrible red wriggly lines under lots of words Google probably thinks I hate grammar by now and added it to my online search history To add insult I now feel like I read The Sun newspaper everyday insert face slap emoji
None of this information was loaded upfront and I then spent another 10 minutes editing my letter to you I do hate wasting my time like this
Perhaps I should have just joined the call queue like everyone else but dont you want to stop this doesnt it cost you about two pounds more per minute to answer phone calls that could be fixed with a few lines of HTML
Many thanks
Paul Wilshaw
UX UI AI ID expert
Yes I did go back and take out all those commas, full stops and nice things like that that probalby . I’ve left it as I sent it for your partial enjoyment.
