Problems with online services • dan.carley.co

I recently had problems with the online services of two well known companies; Nationwide and Eurostar. That in itself is not unusual or noteworthy. But there are some things in common between the two experiences.

tl;dr

Please consider the following when you’re building online services.

Error messages

Try to make error messages useful to the user. Tell them what went wrong. Don’t suggest trying again, without making any changes, unless you think it’s going to help. Moreover, don’t lie about people being aware of the problem and that it’s being investigated unless you have a really robust process to do so.

I realise that this is easier said than done. Not all errors are expected. Bugs are common in software. There’s also a tension with security about disclosing the inner workings of your code to users. You probably don’t want to give them all of your debug information, especially if it’s a sensitive system that deals with bookings or money.

For example though, if you know that a problem may happen when validating a users details then surface that information. It may help the user self-diagnose their issue before they even contact you. If they do need to contact you then it will be easier for your support staff to triage the case. If you’re unable to provide descriptive messages then consider using codes, either unique to the problem or that users transaction, and provide a good mechanism for subsequently looking them up.

Channels for when things go wrong

Provide a good channel for when things go wrong. Start by making it easier for users to report problems and allowing them to include contextual information.

For example, GOV.UK has a “Is there anything wrong with this page?” link at the bottom of every page, which asks the users to describe what they were trying to do, what they expected to happen, and what really happened. Google Cloud Platform has a feedback link which lets you capture a screenshot of the current page and then highlight pertinent sections, as well as omitting sensitive information that you don’t want to submit.

Once you have received the information make sure it’s triaged in a timely manner and passed onto the correct people. Give first line support staff some way of reporting software bugs and tallying repeated occurrences. You don’t have to commit to fixing them immediately, but at least you’ll be aware of the problems and have data to prioritise them.

My suspicion is that many developers in very large companies have no idea of the bugs that their users experience because the business has disconnected them so far from their users. Or they know about the bugs and would love to fix them, but they never get prioritised, because they don’t have enough data to support doing so.

Assisted digital

My recent experiences have left me suddenly quite empathetic with assisted digital. As someone that has a good understanding of and access to computers, I am definitely not a use case. But I found myself in a not dissimilar position whereby it was only possible (or otherwise deeply inconvenient) to do the thing that I needed to do online and I wasn’t able to do so because of circumstances beyond my control.

I was also reminded of this first hand when seeing customers at the Eurostar terminal who were told that they had to look up additional travel advice and rebook tickets online but didn’t have access to the Internet. One lady approached us outside because she didn’t have a smartphone, wasn’t able to lookup any information, and had already spent a long time on hold to a call centre. I guess the simplest lesson is not to assume that everyone will be able to do the thing you’re suggesting.

My woes

Onto my specific woes. Besides being therapeutic, my hope is that either other people will search for these errors and find a solution to their problem, or (less likely) the companies will be shamed into fixing the bugs that I was unable to report.

Nationwide

My wife and I have a mortgage with Nationwide. The rate we were on had come to the end of its deal period, so we wanted to switch to a new deal and thus lower rate.

As an aside, it seems that there were some changes to legislation last year that meant mortgage lenders have to clearly distinguish between applications that are based on product advice (after a long discussion about the customers circumstances) from those that are execution-only (the customer has chosen the product that they want without any advice from the lender).

It seems that an interpretation of this, perhaps to cover themselves, is that you can only perform execution-only changes yourself online. If you’re not able to do it online then you have to book an appointment with a mortgage advisor which involves talking in detail about your circumstances, which will take between 1 to 2 hours.

We knew the product that we wanted and had done it before online. However this time it wouldn’t let us. When submitting the second page of terms and conditions acceptance, it would say “please wait” for 30 seconds, then produce an error page with the message:

Sorry, we are unable to process your request due to a system error.
We are aware of the issue and our technical team is investigating the problem.
Please try submitting your request again.

I tried a few more times and got the same each time. Contrary to the message, I knew from my experience of using and supporting online systems that nobody was aware of my problem and that nobody would be currently investigating it.

So over the course of the next two weeks I tried the following. Meanwhile some lenders were withdrawing their deals because of projected base rate rises:

First of all I tried reporting the problem using the “secure messaging” section of their online banking. They replied the following day to suggest that I clear my cookies and try another browser or computer. That of course did not help.
Next I called them and they suggested that I try a different method, by selecting “not registered for Internet banking”, because it was known that some people had experienced problems with the other method. Same error again.
I called again and they reviewed my account details, found that our occupancy status was incorrect, changed it and advised me to try again in 24 hours, allowing for their systems to update. That didn’t work either.
I called again and was transferred to someone related to technical faults. They couldn’t accept a screenshot of the error page, so I had to talk them through the user journey and describe each of the pages including the error message. They said it would take three to five days so I should pursue other means of making the application and that they would contact me back soon with an reference and update.
I went into a branch to see if I could do the execution-only application there. I couldn’t, I would have to book an appointment with a mortgage advisor. They let me try the online application on their computers but ironically the browser was either too old or too locked down that I couldn’t navigate their Javascript-heavy website to get to the first page of the application. They tried to chase up the fault report for me and couldn’t find any reference of it, but they were able to find phone appointments sooner than I could get one in branch.
Reluctantly, I called again to make a phone appointment and report the problem again. It would be at least an hour and half at a time that the other account holder is also contactable. They weren’t able to transfer me to anyone that would take a fault report and the best that they could do was record that there was a generic problem (without taking any details of the journey or error).

While booking the phone appointment I was asked to confirm my email address because the system wouldn’t let them proceed with the one that was already listed for my account. I instantly knew that this was significant. I use Gmail’s “+” aliasing feature to categorise and track emails from different parties. Despite being a perfectly legitimate address, every so often a company will build a sign-up form where such addresses are rejected, or much worse they will accept the address at sign-up and then prevent you from using it later (ASOS, I’m looking at you).

I asked them to change the address on my account and finished booking the phone appointment. Then immediately rushed off to try the online process again. No luck. I waited 24 hours, because that’s apparently how long computers take to update information. Success! The “invalid” email address on my account was the cause of the problem.

It felt like I’d found it by pot luck though. There is nothing about the error message or the application process that indicated it cared about my email address. I seem to recall that the page after the error asks you to confirm your contact details and my guess is that it was trying to parse or validate them before displaying, but never got that far. I should note that everyone I spoke to was incredibly helpful in what they did. They just weren’t able to help the actual problem.

Eurostar

My wife and I recently travelled to Belgium for her birthday. On our way back we got to Brussels to find that our Eurostar train had been cancelled and there would be no further services that day. We had a very stressful few hours arranging childcare for our son back home and trying to find a hotel which hadn’t been fully booked. Oh well, these things happen.

When we had eventually sorted those things out we attempted to rebook our Eurostar journey for the following day. All of the morning departures had already gone. We tried booking for the first afternoon departure that was available but when submitting the very last confirmation page it gave an error message, paraphrasing everything but the error code:

Unfortunately a technical problem occurred. Please try again later. (EIF_132)

I tried again several times. I reluctantly tried booking a later departure time, even though it wouldn’t get us home until the evening and would make logistics with our son even harder, but still got the same error. I kept trying. Eventually the earlier departure became fully booked and no longer available either.

There is a web form that you can fill out if you’re having trouble booking, whereby you specify roughly when you’d like to travel and wait for them to contact you back. But it’s quite difficult to find and it’s asynchronous so you have no idea when they will contact you, if at all, and whether you’ll miss other departures in the meantime. I submitted it but didn’t hear anything back.

I kept trying for nearly an hour. I got quite good at remembering where all of the fields and buttons on the forms were. Meanwhile my wife was on the phone, on hold, trying to talk to a human.

I thought about trying to book a much later departure to see if it was just a problem with the departure times being oversubscribed, but the error only occurred on the final confirmation page and we couldn’t afford to arrive home any later than we already would.

Out of desperation I tried something else. I rebooked my own ticket individually and it worked. I then, very hurriedly and quite nervously, rebooked my wife’s ticket and that also worked. We were eight coaches apart and later than we had first hoped, but at least we were going home.

My wife did eventually get through on the phone, almost an hour after first calling and a while after I had managed to rebook individually. They weren’t able to change our booking to anything more preferable.