Credit Card Usability on Travel Sites

March 26th, 2009 by Prateek Dayal | Print Credit Card Usability on Travel Sites

Last few weeks, I have had a few of my relatives call me up and ask me to help them out figure reservations on some travel sites. These are well known (and well funded) sites like cleartrip and makemytrip so one would expect them to be super easy to use and book. However I was amazed at how screwed up the usability of these sites is in general.

On cleartrip for example, there is no help for the credit card field. For most people, transacting for the first time on the internet, its very hard to figure out if they should enter the card number with spaces or without. In fact its very easy to write a small javascript that will just take the credit card number and remove spaces (or dashes) if the user enters them. To top it, the CC field does not allow more than 16 characters so if you type with spaces, you will be stuck at 13 characters with no error/warning message.

I have had a relative struggle with this with this screen and call me up for help last week. In fact, it took me sometime to figure out (over phone) why the site was not accepting his credit card and why he was not able to punch in more than 13 characters. According to him, the number on the credit card was printed with spaces so thats what he expected to punch in there.

There are several other examples and I am sure a lot of these issues can be exposed with some usability testing.

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  • http://technofriends.in Vaibhav

    Very interesting and worth mentioning Prateek. In my opinion, thr are countless examples. I am doing alpha testing for a web application backed by a big industry shot these days ( can’t name them here) and believe me, when i first had a look at the application i just couldnt believe it that this app is backed by Mr.X. I guess stupidity is a constant companion.

    Will share more on this when we meet.
    Cheers

  • http://technofriends.in Vaibhav

    Very interesting and worth mentioning Prateek. In my opinion, thr are countless examples. I am doing alpha testing for a web application backed by a big industry shot these days ( can’t name them here) and believe me, when i first had a look at the application i just couldnt believe it that this app is backed by Mr.X. I guess stupidity is a constant companion.

    Will share more on this when we meet.
    Cheers

  • http://abhinavsingh.com/blog Abhinav Singh

    Well I have several friends in the companies/startup you mentioned and I have talked with them several times on this issue. And as far as I know they don’t give a damn to usability stuff. Mainly because their big bosses don’t think that can play an important part.

  • http://abhinavsingh.com/blog Abhinav Singh

    Well I have several friends in the companies/startup you mentioned and I have talked with them several times on this issue. And as far as I know they don’t give a damn to usability stuff. Mainly because their big bosses don’t think that can play an important part.

  • http://www.enidhi.net/ Shrinidhi Hande

    MMT and cleartrip charge 5 to 10% more than airline websites, so I just refer to these sites for most convenient flight and then go to respective airline website for booking…

    I asked a question on this to cleartrip on twitter but got no reply.

  • http://www.enidhi.net/ Shrinidhi Hande

    MMT and cleartrip charge 5 to 10% more than airline websites, so I just refer to these sites for most convenient flight and then go to respective airline website for booking…

    I asked a question on this to cleartrip on twitter but got no reply.

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  • http://www.spike.com/profile/christianbooks Willis Leehan

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