February 2013 – The UI Observatory

No-reply emails are bad. This is worse.

In yet another attempt at claiming missing airline reward miles, I had contacted Lufthansa’s Miles & More loyalty program about some serious problems with their website.

They responded via email a few days later, explaining that, in order to use the online mileage claim form, you must have purchased a ticket directly from their (partner) airline.

That, however, was exactly what we had done.

Hence, I wrote another email to provide them with more details and included a link to my blog post — just in case their developers would want to investigate this further.

The next email I received from Lufthansa was definitely not what I had expected.

Forcing the customer onto a detour from email to web

Here’s a screenshot of the original German email:

A Mail.app window with Lufthansa's response to my email inquiry.

Allow me to translate for your reading pleasure:

Dear Miles & More participant,

thank you for contacting us.

Unfortunately, we cannot answer your inquiry this way. Therefore, we ask you to use our feedback form at www.miles-and-more.com > Help & Contact > Contact via E-Mail > E-mail the Miles & More Service Team.

Alternatively, you can enter your request in the top-right search field, and you will receive suggestions regarding the most commonly asked questions. Why don’t you just give it a try — with a keyword or even an entire sentence. See you soon at www.miles-and-more.com!

When you contact a company for customer support these days, they often do not accept direct responses to their emails. Instead you’re being steered to another communications channel, like a web form.

Another tell-tale sign that you are not supposed to respond directly is a from: address that begins with something like do-not-reply@… .

With the original Miles & More email, though, that was not the case: Nothing in it mentioned that I could not simply reply, nor was it sent from a no-reply email address. In fact, that email even had its reply-to set to its sender:

The email header of the original response from Miles & More shows that it was sent from service@miles-and-more.com, and its reply-to field is set to the same address.

There’s a case to be made for online contact forms

Generally, forcing customers to use an online contact form, makes things considerably easier for the company.

It ensures that a modicum of the customer’s personal data is collected via mandatory form fields; it allows routing the inquiry to the correct company department by making the user pick from a finite set of inquiry types; and it encourages the customer to keep their messages short by offering a fairly small text field for the actual inquiry.

That said, I had already provided all that information when I submitted my original inquiry via this very form. Linking the email exchange to that data would have been a snap, because a case number was included in the subject line of all emails going back and forth, including their eventual “can’t talk to us this way!” message¹.

Case closed. Somehow.

The initial response did include a snail mail address for the Miles & More support center. I have since sent paper copies of the tickets to that address and, hopefully, will receive the desired mileage credit.

Nevertheless, it does make me wonder what caused this breakdown in this communications process between Lufthansa and me. Was it an issue with the technical implementation, or is it actually intentional to make it as tedious as possible to keep a customer support case open?

I’ve blacked out the case number in the screenshots. ↩

A Progress Bar For a Bus Ride

Progress bars are a staple of user interface design. They let you check the progress of a lengthier process — like copying a large file — with just a quick, cursory glance. And by observing how quickly the bar moves, you can intuitively estimate how long it will take for the process to complete.

Mac OS X's file copying progress dialog contains a prominent progress bar. Additionally, it displays detailed information about the name of the copied files, the copy destination, the amount of data already copied and remaining, and an estimate of the remaining time required for the process to complete.

Progress bars — they’re not just for digital devices

At London’s Heathrow airport, you can find progress bars in an unusual setting: Namely, on-board the shuttle buses that run between the airport’s five terminals.

The buses feature monitors that display useful information on how to transfer between terminals. At he bottom of the screens, a progress bar visualizes the route from one terminal to another.

A monitor suspended from the bus' roof displays comic-style people on an escalator and states,'On arrival follow the purple connection signs'. The progress bar at the bottom shows that the bus has already gone three quarter of the way to its destination, Terminal five.

The number of the destination terminal is shown at the end of the progress bar². A nifty bus icon represents the vehicle’s current position along its route.

Although the bus icon does not move along its path all that smoothly, seeing it progress at all does help ease that infamous “Are we there yet?!” feeling — especially when you’re worried about making your connection flight.

When (your users are) in a rush, stop cycling screen contents

Here’s an interesting detail: While the bus is moving, the display cycles through several different information screens. Once it approaches its destination, however, it settles on a single screen, which announces the terminal you’re just arriving at.

Once the bus arrives at Terminal five, the screen shows 'Terminal 5' in large type and displays a large icon that indicates connecting flights. As expected, the progress bar has completed, the bus icon is now hidden, but the T5 indicating the destination is still visible.

By making the display static towards the end of the journey, all passengers immediately get off the bus, instead of possibly blocking the aisle while waiting for another screen-full of information to appear.

Note how the direction of movement in a progress bar is from left to right, at least in our part of the world where we read and write from left to right. I wonder whether someone who grew up with a right-to-left script would consider the opposite orientation “more natural”. ↩

Yet Another Attempt at Claiming Missing Airline Reward Miles

Back in August 2010 I had tested how you can claim missing airline reward miles via the websites of Lufthansa and British Airways, respectively. Just recently I was on two flights with United airlines, for which I still need to claim my reward miles. This made for the perfect opportunity for a follow-up on this topic.

Alas, in the almost one-and-a-half years since, almost nothing has changed.

The same-old, same-old (both good and bad)

British Airways rebranded their miles to “Avios”, so the wording of the link for claiming un-credited miles may just be that little bit less intuitive now. It is still in the same convenient location, though.

On the British Airways website, a link labeled 'claim missing avios' is located directly underneath the list of recent account transactions.

On Lufthansa’s Miles & More website, the previous text-only navigation menu has been replaced with a set of icons that mimic the look-and-feel of the iPhone’s Launchpad. In that menu, the “Request Miles” link/icon combo is a bit easier to find.

Unfortunately, my key complaint still applies: Where British Airways is happy to ask for just the ticket number to get the claim process started, Lufthansa still requires you to fill out this extensive form:

The form on the Lufthansa website contains eight data items, namely airline name, date of flight, flight number, booking class, departure airport, arrival airport, ticket number, and name on ticket. Of these, only the latter field is optional. All seven others are required.

Obviously, such minor changes alone would not justify writing about this topic again. The serious new problems I experienced with the Miles and More website now are well worth sharing with you, though.

Unknown #1: The flight class

The form requires picking a booking class. That information is not found on the boarding pass, but according to the confirmation email, the classes for my two flights were “G” and “K”, respectively.

Surprisingly, the popup menu does not offer the former at all:

The booking class menu contains five items for business class, thirteen for economy, and two for first, but none of these are of type G.

Since the second flight was listed as a “K” class, I simply selected that class for the first flight as well.

Unknown #2: The flight number

On the boarding pass, the flight number is stated as “UA1555Y”. Nevertheless, the Miles & More website considers this number invalid:

Admittedly, this problem is not directly linked to the website’s design. In fact, the error message is displayed prominently, and thanks to the high-contrast highlighting, it’s easy to find the field whose entry needs fixing. Also, in the confirmation email, the flight number is listed without the trailing “Y”.

Nevertheless, this is something that the website could take care of automatically: it could silently discard the offending character, or at least offer via a dialog box to fix this, saying something like: “The flight number ‘UA1555Y’ you have entered is invalid. Did you mean ‘UA1555’?”.

In this instance, it was easy to correct “my” mistake, but the biggest problem was yet to come.

Unknown #3: The airline code (Say what?!)

After hitting return, the form came back with the following error messages:

For both flights, an error message is displayed, reading 'The entered airline code is invalid'.

None of the form fields was highlighted, so it was impossible to tell which data item needed to be modified to make the website accept my input.

The only thing I could think of was to add the airline code to the flight number. Unfortunately, entering “UA268” instead of “268” did not help, as the site now complained about an invalid flight number.

If you think about it, the ticket number should be perfectly sufficient to verify a mileage claim. This is especially true if the ticket was purchased directly from a partner airline’s website.

Instead, you have to meticulously and manually copy a whole bunch of data from the boarding passes into the form. And once you did, you may very well be confronted with an error that you, as the user, cannot fix, but that stubbornly prevents you from submitting said data.

So I’m stuck now. And used the only option I had.

I’ve contacted Lufthansa via their website’s contact form and hope they will tell me what to do next. Who knows: Maybe they will even take the time to explain the problem to me.

As soon as I hear back from them, I’ll update this post. Stay tuned!