Tuesday, June 17, 2008

How many ways are there to pay?

I debated posting this dumb UI example, maybe this is a case where I’m the dumb one and not the UI.


I went to the EA Store to buy the teaser app for the forthcoming game Spore. (Which is totally awesome BTW) The checkout page had this section to fill out for the payment:

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I entered my credit card info and then looked at the set of options, ClickandBuy and PayPal. I had no idea what ClickandBuy is. I know what PayPal is and I know that wasn’t how I was going to pay so ClickandBuy must be a fancy name for their payment system. I pick ClickandBuy and continue.


I get an order confirmation page, I confirmed and then got a ClickandBuy page asking me for my credit card info. Huh? What the hell? I already entered my credit card info (actually twice, maybe I’ll blog about that also)!


At this point I realized what happened, ClickandBuy must be some kind of third party payment system and I shouldn't have selected it. I try to cancel the transaction but there is no god damn way to do so without contacting EA customer service. That transaction is now stuck at awaiting payment. Doesn’t even seem to be a way to continue with ClickandBuy if I wanted to.


I add the game to my cart again and checkout again and see the screen above and see where I went wrong. The Credit Card section has a radio button followed by a sizable gap then the remaining options. Come on! Can’t you indent the credit card details to make the radio option stand out some?


I can’t believe I’m the first person to make this mistake, I wonder how often it happens. So tell me, am I the dumb guy here? Is this UI perfectly valid and I just needed to pay attention more?

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