Feeling Gassy: Keyspan Energy Website Pain

Like most people, I’m a big fan of being able to quickly and easily manage my utility bills online and the good news is that now pretty much every major utility lets you do this. Where things get a little bit less happy is in the design and execution of these websites. Generally they seem to suffer from ‘everything-itis’, where the very usefulness of the site is squeezed out of them, normally by a committee (or committee of committees) who just can’t cut down their list of requirements to focus on what’s important.. the customer. Instead of nicely focussed user goal driven design there is a tendency towards overblown portals with opaque links, 95% of which the average consumer never needs or understands.

Today’s frustrations came from Keyspan Energy. Namely – excessive use of non-working Javascript (and no plain HTML fallback) and ridiculous support email requirements (which means they’ll never know of this problem). Having retrieved my password, very promptly – so that was good, I logged in using Firefox 2.0 and immediately found that no links on the site worked except for ‘Log Out’. Firefox is now a popular enough browser that people should be checking it works, but apparently not at Keyspan as the error log was full of Javascript errors. Hmm.. but nowhere could a simple, working HTML only version of the site be found. Oh development teams! If you keep doing this you’ll just have your nice AJAX toys taken away you know…

All was not lost though, I fired up my trusty Internet Explorer 6 (I’ve still not upgraded to 7 for just these sorts of reasons) and the site worked just fine. Well, I say fine, but when I submitted my meter reading I had no feedback to say the site had received it even though the browser had finished updating. Going back to the main panel, then back to the reading told me that ‘Only one reading could be submitted a day’ – but not what my reading was, so I could check it was correct – although apparently I wouldn’t be able to change it even if it was wrong. Oh smashing.

My planned task complete, and only in 15 minutes, I decided to be helpful and let the website team know of these issues. Eventually I located the support link, off the bottom of an internally scrolling section nicely out of site. Why not have it on the fixed bottom panel, easily accessible I wondered? Ah, here be vogons it seems. These folk really don’t want your feedback. How do I know this? Well, having found the support form and it’s handy selection of radio button choices, I found you can only submit the form having entered all your personal details, including full address, phone number and your account number before you could submit your question in a text field that was all of about 50 characters big. At this point I gave up. They already had these details as I’d logged into my account, so this was obviously a cunning management plan to make you only contact them if you are really really desperate – “Darling, could you just look in the burning cabinet over there for an old gas bill please? Keyspan need my account number so I can submit a gas leak help request online. Thanks awfully.”

So, Keyspan. If you happen to come across this post I apologise for not contacting you directly, but feel flattered that your website inspired me to spend 15 minutes writing this post instead of five minutes filling in your unnecessarily awkward support form.