Domino's Don't Make Me Think (school boy error)

We're thinking ... less is more!

Amusing incident when getting a treat pizza from Dominios tonight. Buying online we noticed the 555 offer. Order any three 9.5" pizzas for £5.55, a great price.

We decided to go for the 555 promotion, we selected our three 9.5" pizzas and filled the basket. But strangely no discount was forthcoming. I tried this a number of ways but always the same ... No discount? This was some what vexing and we were all getting hungry.

This reminded me of a promotional problem I had seen before ... The issue is two fold (1) the inability to recognise the contents of the basket; (2) not anticipating the varity of user interactions.

The solution to both our basket and hunger problem took a little time to work out ... Looking at the interface again I noticed a DEALS tab ... Clicking on this took us to a page where all the promotions were listed with the ability to place an order, Yea!!!! The order was placed and we just needed to wait for the notification to pick up the pizzas.

While waiting for the green light to pick up the pizza we mused that dominos would be getting into a trouble with customers. They would see the 555 deal but be unable to make it work. This is a UK wide promotion so You would have to assume this is goi to be a big problem. This was semi confirmed when we went to collect the pizza, an argument about the promotion was already raging. I think it's safe to say there will be update requests to the site.

Domino's Don't Make Me Think!

There's a great book by Steve Krug entitle "Don't make me think" ... to paraphrase what it is saying ... it's advice is that an interface should be obvious and not require un due amounts of thought. This is the oposit of what i was faced with at Dominos. 

Possible Improvements

1) The 555 promotion banner links to the DEALS page ... this is the obvious and easiest fix. It also let's customers see what other promotions are available.

2) The 555 promotion banner links to the 555 promotion order page. This is a more appropriate fix for just the 555 promotion, however linking directly to the 555 order page effectively hides the other promotions ... one of which might be more interesting to the customer. For this reason I think we rule this option out, unless perhaps there is another link to the DEALS page.

3) Configure the promotional engine to work correctly - but my guess is that this is a more complicated issue and will require a fix.

4) Fix the Ecommerce promotional engine so that it can detect and correctly apply promotions to appropriate orders (this may be v.complicated).