Computer says no…

It’s the week before my birthday. The Nike shop send me a great e-marketing opportunity saying I can get a birthday discount. Perfect! After looking for a while, I decide I want to purchase a running top. It’s worked, Nike! I’m going to actually purchase something due to a well executed e-marketing campaign. Success!

But wait, I need to log in to my Nike account to access the special discount. When I tap ‘login’ Nike’s system simply gives me an error message, over and over. Well… no discount? No dice. What a shame.

*For the record; I tried this every day that week. Every day I had the same error message with no explanation.

Key Heuristics to remember…

“Software should be confident” - Alan Cooper

“Visibility of system status” - Jakob Nielson

Solution…

Okay, firstly this could be an issue with my web browser. But I had the latest version of a leading browser (Firefox) and I had even cleared Cookies and turned off the security protections on Nike.com/gb - just in case. It still wouldn’t work. So I believe this must be an issue on the site’s side.

Nike.com would be getting so much traffic every day… this could be crippling to their company if thousands, if not millions of other potential customers are encountering the same negative experience. I think the UX professionals at Nike need to sit down with the developers and get to the bottom of the issue. Perhaps there’s broken code that is affecting how the database server interacts with the consumer-facing front end. Bug’s like this need to be fixed, to ensure a best-in-class user experience - as would be expected from a leading brand, like Nike.