Software Journal

Before giving the top 5 reasons why this is an amazingly bad website, perhaps it makes sense to mention that there are 3 criteria that websites should meet before they can even be considered in this category:

1. Website has to be getting more than a 100,000 visitors a day. If not, it is simply too small to given this honor. (t-mobile gets about 1.5M).
2. It gotta be selling something (that is, valuable to the owner). If not, say it is just some forums etc, then we should cut them some slack.
3. It has to be an official and legal website. If someone creates a defamation website for say the president or Tiger Woods, or someone, and gets lots of attention and sells t-shirts, that can’t be a candidate. Similarly if it is not a G rated legal website, then all bets are off about what is good and what is bad.

Now that we have that clear, here is a list of 5 things that t-mobile.com utterly fails on. I, as a neophyte web usability expert, with Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think as my only relevant reading, hereby claim to know more than t-mobile’s web UI team.

T-Mobile.com’s 5 biggest UI mistakes:

1. Doesn’t work on Firefox or Chrome! I must be unfair or biased, but I think it is OK for my dad’s medical drug analysis company (which gets about 20 visitors/month and doesn’t sell anything on the web) to not work in Firefox/Chrome, and yet I think it is not OK for T-mobile to not work on Firefox and Chrome.
2. Bad tabbing style: The My T-Mobile pages contain two levels of drop down, but the tab style is not clear. So, you cannot see whether the second layer is a sub layer of the first, or if it is just the description of the first in smaller font, or if it is independent tabs? Especially consider that none of the second tabs is highlighted.
3. Bad Navigation (Aka “you want to spend the money, but can’t”): I spent 35 minutes on the t-mobile website trying to add a messaging bundle, but couldn’t find it where to add. Finally figured it out after ordering the bundle via a customer service rep on the phone and she helped to find.
4. Connect and Share -> Configure Email tells you “You don’t have email access”. This was the most bizarre. Thank God it appears they have fixed it now. Earlier it used to shows some BlackBerry internet email BS, and you were left scratching your head that you have had email on your BlackBerry for the last 3 years, why you wouldn’t have it today.
5. Dysfunctional Search: Searching for something very basic as “Messaging” on the t-mobile search brings you to a generic Motorola CLIQ page. That may be featured product of the day or the only cellphone in the world that has messaging option, you would never know.

Based on their website, I suggest a new logo for T-Mobile: Get More, and Get Even More (frustrated with the T-Mobile website).