Moo & Flickr: Too Damn Hard to Navigate

Is it me or does it seem like technology is getting worse and we are experiencing more and more failures? And, what about poor website navigation, one of my favorite topics and well known pet peeve? How much time do you waste on the Internet trying to find what you need?

This is a frequently talked about issue, and a known problem, but either my patience is in decline or people are playing less attention to friendly user interfaces (UIs).

In my most recent experience, lack of success has applied to recent online purchases through less well known clothing catelogues and travel research, where after days of entering preference after preference, my shopping cart remains empty. The cherry on the cake came after spending time on two sites where I expected it to be easy.

I decided to order a few sets of Moo cards for friends. In the contact and about page, it doesn't tell me who they are or where they are, nor where to go for more information or for all their job listings, where those positions would physically be?

I would have loved one of their UI experts if they have one, to look over my shoulder as I was clicking away, hungry for one link, any link that would allow me to continue shopping after getting my first order in. Two hours later, I managed to accidentally get four things in my cart, which thankfully saved me from having to pay four individual shipping charges when all of these orders were going to the same address.

If you go to Products, the choices seem to be clear. It's even clear that you CAN upload your own images, however my only choices are a list of names I'm familiar with only because I'm in the tech industry and even then, only four of them jumped off the page: Vox, Facebook, Flickr and Live Journal.

SO, to play ball here, you are forced into joining one or more of these services to upload your photos. While I have both a Facebook and Flickr account, I don't keep the majority of my photos in either, so a simple order resulted in my having to upload all the images I wanted to use, for each of my four orders -- slowly, five at a time. Sure, there's the Flickr uploader, but that involves another download.

Call me stupid and my tech friends may, but Flickr's UI does NOT make it easy to manage your photos, one of the reasons, I merely have an account but don't use it regularly.

Why not make a nice easy button that says upload my photos, upload more photos, upload period on the main page. I have to discover (which took awhile) that its under the You tab.

Bottom line guys: run your UI in front of your grandmother or your Nebraskan cousin before you release this stuff. Time is valuable and it seems like I'm spending more time online rather than less trying to figure things out that should be 'in my face.' My hope is that solutions will make it easy to get where I need to go and buy what I want to buy without a helluva lot of thinking.