Okay, so, I like pizza. I order pizza. A while back, for some reason, it came to pass that I tried Domino’s pizza. The pizza was good, but what really struck me was the ordering process. They’d done a wonderful job.
- The ordering process remembered previous orders, and allowed me to refer to recent orders or save orders under a particular name.
- I was asked once, when creating an account, whether or not I wanted mailing lists.
- The “order tracker” provided exactly the information I wanted (when pizza left their store, for instance), without being intrusive.
- The menu for picking pizza was well-constructed and did a good job of handling special orders.
They have now managed to break all of these. I perpetually have “no previous orders”, even when logged in. Every order I place presents me with checkboxes including a pre-checked “spam meh” button. (It’s bad enough that they keep asking, but resetting it every time is extra annoying.) The order tracker talks loudly, and you have to turn the audio off manually, which you can only do AFTER it has finished its spiel. And when you select things like “extra cheese”, they often generate an animated window which pops up and tells you that this isn’t displayed but they will get it right when they make the pizza. Even if you’ve ordered that thing several times before.
In short, they’ve gone from “wow, this is a great pizza-ordering experience” to “wow, this is almost as annoying as having to talk to people on the phone.” Since I quite dislike talking on the phone, that’s an accomplishment, and it dramatically improves the business opportunities for their competitors in my area, none of whom have online ordering.
It’s really impressive how flawlessly they’ve identified exactly those things about their order process which were most pleasant for users, and fixed exactly those.
Comments [archived]
From: JWeezy
Date: 2010-12-17 18:26:51 -0600
I’ve found another person who shares my plight.
I, too, loved Domino’s online pizza-ordering process. It was great that you could make favourite orders AND see previous orders. It was a one-click process for me, even over my cell-phone’s mobile browser.
Now, I have to go through the hassle of picking out every item in my usual order every single time. It is very annoying because I look for that feature each time I order only to find it conspicuously missing.
We should get a petition to bring back the old version of the website.