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A Challenge: Find O2’s Pay Monthly Rates in 5 Clicks or Less

By Michael | October 18th, 2006 | Usability

O2 rates

Here’s a challenge: starting from O2’s homepage, find O2’s pay monthly phone rates in five clicks or less. (Answer below.) For some reason, the websites of each of the four major phone networks in the UK make this—and a whole lot of seemingly common other tasks—extremely difficult. Is this in fact an unreasonable thing to want to know? Are the people who visit e.g. Orange’s homepage really more interested in 7.7% APR variable loans (as currently advertised) than the mobile services Orange offers?

Here’s the (I think) optimal paths from homepage to rates page, of the four major networks:

3: 2 clicks, no mis-clicks:

  1. “Price plans” (left nav)
  2. “Pay monthly”

Orange: 3 clicks, no mis-clicks:

  1. “Orange shop” (top nav)
  2. “pay monthly” | “new customers” | “plans”
  3. “monthly plans”

Vodafone: 4 clicks, several mis-clicks:

  1. “Get more from your mobile” (top nav)
  2. “Price plans” (left nav)
  3. “Pay monthly price plans” | “More information”
  4. “View our best ever price plans available from any Vodafone store”

O2: 5 clicks and many, many mis-clicks:

  1. “Mobiles & Tariffs” (top navigation)
  2. “Tariffs”
  3. “Pay Monthly”
  4. “Our Best Ever Plans”
  5. “Click here to view O2 High Street Pay Monthly Plans” (leads to PDF (!))

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Comments

  1. By justin. | October 19th, 2006 at 10:53 am

    Finding Skype’s (http://www.skype.com) international call rates was also a bit of a frustrating experience, even though it turns out there’s three 2-click paths to find rates! A search of the homepage does not contain the text ‘international’, ‘rates’, or ‘cost’ (excluding one in body copy), so to find one path you have to remember their ‘SkypeOut’ phrase for calling other phones via Skype.

    The other two paths involve 1) the “Learn about cheap calls” link and 2) the green speech bubble “…and really cheap calls to ordinary phones”. I disregarded that whole section because in my quick scan it seemed to offer advice about Skype to new users, and more importantly I didn’t think the speech bubble was a link! Instead I ended up zooming down to the footer digging through the list of links where I thought it should be.

    Actually thinking about this, I’ve often scanned pages looking for ‘vanilla’ links on sites, all along unaware of the large image screaming out exactly what I wanted. Maybe for every large painfully-obvious image link there should be a vanilla link that uses plain english (e.g. ‘international call rates’, not ‘Learn about cheap calls’ or ‘SkypeOut’).

  2. By Toby | October 19th, 2006 at 3:03 pm

    The whole Skype Out thing confused me. I like the site generally, from a brand perspective. but it just goes to show, briefing somebody to ensure there are ‘less than x clicks to purchase’ doesn’t gaurantee decent conversion.

  3. By mjs | October 25th, 2006 at 10:59 am

    How did we get on to Skype?! I actually admire the Skype site a lot (particularly the copy and IA; I also just noticed today that they’re one of the few international sites that bothered to make a version of their site with UK spelling), and I think they do a decent job of conveying their rates, especially considering that calling regular telephones is not their main business. (Unlike the mobile phone companies.)