Monthly Archives: March 2023

Rants, Software development

The Return of Mystery Meat Navigation

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Many of Malta’s government services can nowadays be accessed online. However, we still lag behind other countries in terms of their usefulness and ease of use. In this article, we’ll see a small example from the website of the Malta Public Registry that throws usability out of the window. As with other articles in The Sorry State of the Web series, and inspired by Vincent Flanders’ Web Pages That Suck, the aim is to learn good web design by looking at bad web design.

A screenshot of Certifikati.gov.mt, the website of the Malta Public Registry.

Certifikati.gov.mt is the website of the Malta Public Registry. I came across it a few days ago, and it has a simple and modern design, similar to many other contemporary websites. However, it makes one fundamental mistake that I haven’t seen in years, and you can see it in the navigation icons in the top-right corner of the website:

The icons in Certifikati’s navigation. Can you guess what they mean?

We have a row of icons, but what do they mean? We can perhaps try to guess, as some are more conventional than others (e.g. the shopping basket). But, to get a real idea of the range of information and services that a website offers, the only way is to hover over the icons one by one:

Hovering over an icon containing a sign post reveals that it means “Certificate Information”.

Aside from the questionable suitability of some of the icons, this kind of design is a tedious exercise in frustration, because instead of a website telling you clearly what it can do for you and where to find the information you want, you have to go and dig it up yourself, one icon at a time.

In fact, there is a name for this. It’s called Mystery Meat Navigation, a term coined by Vincent Flanders (of Web Pages That Suck) back in 1998. You can read about it in Flanders’ Introduction to Mystery Meat Navigation, Wikipedia’s Mystery Meat Navigation page, or my “On Mystery Meat Navigation and Unusability” article (originally published in 2013 at Programmer’s Ranch, and republished two years later here at Gigi Labs).

This is the first instance of Mystery Meat Navigation I’ve seen in many years. Although it used to be very common in the era of Geocities and Flash websites, the change in trend towards more minimal designs and ready-made templates over the course of 25 years thankfully seems to have caused it to fizzle out. As a result, I was very surprised to come across this clear example of regression.

It seems like most people have forgotten about the trap of Mystery Meat Navigation, and by writing about it again, I hope to raise awareness and help people avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Rants, Software development

The Sorry State of Air Malta’s Online Check-In

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Dealing with Air Malta is always quite frustrating, no matter what you need to do. After the ordeal of booking a flight, detailed in The Sorry State of Air Malta’s Website, it was finally time to catch that dreaded flight. This time, to mitigate potential issues with overbookings, I decided to check-in online.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do: I googled Air Malta’s online check-in, hoping to go straight there:

The first search result brought me to this form:

A friend of mine told me that the process is easy, and the form looked simple enough (as you can see above). What could possibly go wrong?

“Check-in System Error”, it said, “A system error has occurred. Please try again later.” Typical: they don’t tell you what the problem is, and you can try again as many times as you like, because it’s not going to work. Knowing Air Malta’s hatred of apostrophes, I tried my surname with and without the apostrophe, to no avail. I even tried to “Show Additional Options”:

Not only does “Show Additional Options” clear whatever you entered in the first two fields (so you’d have to type them in again if you wanted to go back to using the booking reference), but the 13-digit Ticket Number is nowhere to be found in the flight booking confirmation email.

Later, I figured out what the problem was. If you go to the Air Malta website and proceed to do the online check-in from there, you get to a completely different form which does actually work (except that when you get to the summary, it displays the wrong number of luggages):

What this probably means is that during some rebranding exercise, they set up a new online check-in form, but left the old and dysfunctional one in place, and Google still ranks that as number one.

It’s rather silly to assume that people will reach your website through its homepage. As it turns out, though, Air Malta are not alone. Just today, I wanted to find some recent news on the website of stockbrokers Rizzo, Farrugia & Co. (who, unlike Air Malta, I highly respect), so I did the same thing and googled it:

Clicking on the top result, I ended up here:

Even if you haven’t been to their website before, it’s pretty clear to see that the formatting is a bit of a mess (and doesn’t fit the style of the rest of the site), the dates are in the future, and the download links take you back to the same page. The reason for this is likely the same as with Air Malta’s online check-in: they had some old page that they abandoned in favour of new pages, and forgot to remove it. Or maybe it wasn’t an old page, but one that came back from the future!

To conclude: in the last article about Air Malta’s website, I highlighted the importance of empathy and understanding the journey that the user takes. Here, we’ve seen how the journey doesn’t always start at the homepage, so it’s important to (a) make sure that pages are accessible and functional even when accessed from search engines, and (b) take down any obsolete pages so that they don’t confuse users.

This article is part of The Sorry State of the Web series.

Rants, Software development

The Sorry State of Air Malta’s Website

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Air Malta is a real mess, but let’s face it: if you live in Malta, for some destinations, you don’t really have any choice but to fly with them. In this article, I’m not going to talk about Air Malta’s long-standing financial woes, their shady practice of overbookings, or their customer service (or lack thereof), none of which have improved over the years.

Instead, in the spirit of the Sorry State of the Web series, I’m going to talk about the simple journey of booking a flight, in the hope that we can learn a thing or two about user experience in the process.

Selecting a flight on AIr Malta’s homepage.

We start off by selecting a flight on Air Malta’s website, which has been redesigned in recent years and looks nice and modern. After selecting the departure and arrival airports and dates, we click on “Find flights”. So far so good.

Can’t Go Back

Oops! There’s no flight on one of the selected dates.

The dates I happened to choose at random included one with no flights available. Instead of picking one from the grid shown in the screenshot above, I preferred to go back and start over. Except that I couldn’t, because there’s some redirect in place that breaks the Back button and brings me back here every time.

Service Charge for No Refund

Okay, so I went back to the homepage and started over, selecting different airports and dates, and making it a one-way flight. This time, I have a choice of flights on the same day, and I can pick between three different fares:

Go Light is Non-Refundable (less €19 service fee).

It seems that Air Malta adapted to the uncertainty of COVID19 by providing varying levels of refundability to their flights depending on the option chosen. In each case, you pay a €19 service fee, including when the flight is non-refundable. Wait what?

Illegal Surnames

Your name is not allowed to have an apostrophe, and you can bring a weightless luggage. The name shown is fictional.

I have a long history of airlines and other websites either not accepting my surname or replacing apostrophes with the HTML entity '. Well, we’re in 2023 and Air Malta still thinks we’re not allowed to have apostrophes in our surnames, even though governments have been perfectly happy to accept them for centuries.

As I wrote in earlier editions of the Sorry State of the Web series, this bullshit is just a case of excessively restricted validation. Any concern about the use of apostrophes for SQL injection is easily dismissed by the fact that nowadays we have (and use… yeah, right) prepared statements.

In fact, I found that characters with diacritics (such as French accents or German umlauts) are also excluded from Air Malta’s definition of “alphabetic characters”:

Your surname can’t have accents either.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one experiencing the frustration of an unacceptable surname on a regular basis. It turns out there’s a “Your Name Is Invalid!” Twitter account which regularly posts similar episodes.

Weightless Luggage

If you look on the right-hand-side of the two screenshots above, you’ll notice that there’s a “1 x 0kg (included)” luggage listed. Perhaps it’s a new offer from Air Malta: bring your hand luggage on board for free, as long as it’s weightless!

Successful Payment

I’m supposed to be redirected… but I’m not!

After paying for the flight, I’m taken to this page with a browser title saying “APCO_AUTH_SUCCESS”. It’s got what seems to be XML in the URL’s querystring, presumably the type of SOAP message that people used to coordinate war efforts during the Crusades.

The page also says “Your payment was successful, you are now redirected to the Confirmation page”. No I’m not! The page doesn’t budge and I’m just stuck here.

Conclusion

It takes more than a fancy website to create a good user experience. Despite my aversion to Air Malta, this is also true of many other websites and web applications, especially in Malta where the bar is rather low.

The most important thing when developing a website or web application is to test it. Everything I’ve shown in this article is easily spotted simply by using the website, following a pretty ordinary journey through the booking process. All these things could have been caught by a developer or an Air Malta employee before reaching customers like me.

Another piece of advice around user experience is to have some empathy. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Is your obsession with alphabetic characters going to win any points with a customer simply trying to enter their name? Probably not.

Let’s learn something from this and try to improve. That way we can have happier customers and happier businesses.