How Ranting on UPS’ Website Usability saved me 30 bucks

rant-ragemodeWho knows me also knows about my idealism that comes with a certain stubbornness NOT to accept bullshit. Having worked for Each & Other, an incredibly cool UX agency in Dublin, Ireland, my standards are pretty high, when it comes to website usability.

Now there are different categories of NOT meeting my standards:

3. being misleading and/or a bit buggy
2. forcing me through an unnecessarily complicated “flow”

and of course on rank 1:
Forcing me through an unnecessarily complicated flow that is buggy and lacks useful or contains misleading information!

I can cope with category 3 and 2 usability failures. Category 1 failures trigger “rage mode” given some other preconditions (one being “having some time to deal with this”, another being “wanting to mess with these guys”). With UPS the other day all these things came together.

A little background info and some credit for UPS: I had ordered “Sense by Hello” (which is awesome ★★★★★ by the way), which got delivered from China. Although I already have paid shipping costs, UPS had charged an additional fee. This was due to sense being categorized as “medical device”, which clearly is a huge exaggeration. Probably not their fault. Probably the German government got that money in the end. UPS was quite sneaky though on charging that fee: First it was charged whilst delivery – so I neglected. Twice. The third time, the delivery was “free”. I accepted. Some days later I got the invoice stating the very same amount. Sneaky! No matter who got (would have gotten) the money in the end – I was already feeling harshly or unfairly treated.

The end result and more credit for UPS: Only few days after this email, UPS had transfered the money back. So I didn’t pay anything.

Here’s my mail in German and English (below):

UPS-usability-rant

2 thoughts on “How Ranting on UPS’ Website Usability saved me 30 bucks”

    1. Kam nichts zurück – nur die Überweisung.

      No answer received – only the bank transfer 😀

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