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  • Author Author: Former Member
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A web site out of the ark

Former Member

After recent e-buying experiences, I'm going elsewhere as soon as I've sourced the little that I want for my current project.

 

Reasons are:

 

1.     The Farnell web site is cr@p. It breaks most of the rules of good web site design.

 

2.     I've had the experience of it submitting an order without my clicking on the submit button.

 

3.     Setting up my billing and delivery addresses was a farce during which I found an obvious bug and when I complained about it in forthright terms I got a lecture on political correctness from an obviously ill-educated oik (for Marxists that's a lumpenproletarian).

 

4.     The wording describing a 10% discount voucher code was so misleading as to be, IMO, illegal under UK Law.

 

5.     I cannot find the terms and conditions to which the voucher email refers anywhere on the web site as a result of its dreadful navigation facilities.

 

 

Before anyone says that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'll say that I was responsible for significant aspects of software QA on radar screen displays for a recent upgrade to the UK Air Traffic Control system. HCI doesn't get more critical and if you get it wrong you can kill people hundreds at a time.

 

The Farnell web site is, IMO, so bad that I'm simply not prepared to put up with it any longer than I have to.

 

Mouser beckons.

  • in reply to michaelkellett

    You're welcome. It takes all sorts.

     

    Curiously the moderators have rejected the comment in response to which you wrote the above.

     

    The way it works is that they say they have rejected it and then invite you to edit it. I removed the florid allusions to "conjugals in other places" but it seems they still don't like it. (This is usually a sign of moderators with a limited understanding of the functions of writing who are terrified of being told off for not enforcing political correctness.)

     

    It makes you wonder. If Farnell wants to improve its web site, it is dependent on feedback from people who use it. That feedback includes indications of just how much it has irritated the disgruntled. Yet when one gives any such indications it gets censored. That in itself does not bother me. Nevertheless, if you suppress vehemently critical feedback, you are ipso facto killing all chance of benefiting from it. It is a mentality that I am at a loss to understand.

     

    Incidentally, I have two very good friends with each of whom my first encounter was the occasion for a table-thumping row. Give me plain speaking over mealy-mouthing any day.

     

    I've told Farnell what to do and pointed them towards a source that will tell them what kinds of mistakes they are making. Nevertheless, I'd be willing to bet someone a good dinner that they ignore me entirely and continue in their own inward-looking ways.

     

     

    Plus ca change ......

     

    regards,

    Olwen

  • in reply to Former Member

    Oh Olwen - you are so utterly delicious !

     

    If you didn't exist Tom Sharpe would have had to invent you.

     

    MK

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    At last a frank and succinct expression of a view.

     

    I'd far sooner be told to go elsewhere than be patronised.

     

     

     

    No hard feelings here and I honestly wish you a pleasant evening.

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    Funnily enough I'm not hugely keen on this kind of approach to a reply. Some reactions:

     

    1.     Farnell are, IMO, not getting a very good web site for their money if, after much investment, it remains this bad.

     

    2.     I have given specific comments directly to Farnell, including a recommendation that they get their web site developers to read at least a basic text in GUI design. Specifically I have suggested that they refer to the book "GUI Bloopers" by Jeff Johnson, ISBN-10: 0123706432. From what I have seen of their web site, none of their web developers can have read it, or if they have, they have chosen to ignore it, since the site breaks several of the most elementary rules the book gives.

     

    3.     I was not engaging in a battle of curriculum but merely stating a basic level of qualification for what I was saying.

     

    If I were to make in my work the kinds of blunder that Farnell's web site designers have made, people could be killed. I am under no obligation to appear impressed or deferential when I see shoddy software engineering in whatever context it arises. With Farnell's business model, e-commerce is mission-critical. Just because the bugs piss people off rather than kill them, it does not mean than someone shouldn't expose their web developers' limitations of competence when she sees them.

     

    If you think I should appease the sensitivities of the incompetent, you are entitled to that view - but I consider such appeasement an utter waste of words.

     

     

  • To be honest, after reading your comments and discussion assertions and your answer, I hope it's you to decide soon to go somewhere else.