George Rosier's portfolio & blog site

Firstly, apologies for the silence: Real Life seems to be happening, and Twitter has taken a backseat – as have reviews. Anyway: I’m back!

I was recently looking at flights to Greece, and as part of my research phase I visited the ubiquitously-orange EasyJet site…and I bet you can guess what’s coming up next! Yup – Review Time! God, my life’s incredible.

How did it fare? Do the bargain-basement brand values carry through to their site? Read on and find out!

Disclaimer: I’ve used false dates for the purposes of this review – so don’t bother coming to my house to steal my pants on the dates shown in the screenshots. I will be in, and will summarily execute underwear thieves. Unless you come bearing fig rolls, in which case you’ll be robbed of them first – and then executed. Understood? Good.

Another disclaimer: If you don’t like the colour orange, don’t read this article.

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This is a personal bugbear of mine: badly-designed payment screens. The payment stage is absolutely critical: if a site screws up here, a customer will quite often leave the journey if they:

• Get confused by what’s being asked of them
• The content of the site isn’t accurate/correct
• If the site doesn’t inspire confidence in the purchase process

With that in mind, DomainMonster should revise their card payment section:

It all starts off well: select the card type, and fill in the details…only it gets confusing because I’ve selected Visa Debit, yet each of the questions still have a * next to them, indicating they’re mandatory…except the ones with (Maestro only) are purporting to only need completing if the user has a Maestro card.

So which is it? Do I fill them in anyway? What if my card doens’t have those details on it? What if it does, but I’m being told I don’t need to complete the fields? What’ll happen if I don’t fill them in?

The problem is that these are such trivial issues, but often they’re enough to make users bail out of a journey.

The solution? Dynamically alter the question set depending on the type of card they choose from the drop-down. It’s not hard to do, and could drastically improve the usability of this section.

Travelling a fair distance (120+ miles) each day getting to and from work means the train is really the only method of transport that works for me. As such, I am a regular visitor to the National Rail site (www.nationalrail.co.uk), and have been for a number of years.

Predictably (why else would I be mentioning it?), they’ve recently relaunched it – so I thought I’d share my views of it with you. Does it do the job it sets out to do? Have they taken a step back? Read on!

(Ok so I accept I’m late to the party with this one because eConsultancy have already written an excellent review of the new site – but I’m going to try hard to differentiate, just so you don’t get bored…)

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Merry Christmas! Hope you had a good one.

As a result of a faulty laptop purchase, I’ve been looking at the rather splendid, but horrifically-priced, Mac Book Air. It’s perfect for my commuting requirements (i.e it’s lightweight and has a good battery life), but I wanted to find out how much it’d be on finance. How did I get on? Read on and find out!

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Everyone hates paying their TV license. There’s no escaping it, and it’s annoying to think we’re being made to fund the likes of Eastenders and other such guff. So how do they go about achieving this feat online?

I am writing this whilst on the train, so here we have…

A (short) review of www.tvlicensing.co.uk

As mentioned already, the thought of being made to pay for the privilege of watching colour television in our own homes is all sorts of shit – especially when the fee goes towards paying for programs you probably don’t even watch. Does the site support the shit-ness? Does it make you want to part with your money? Or is it like every other quango site? Read on and find out!
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