UX

Boston MBTA Website UX Fail

Recently I needed to purchase a MBTA Charlie Card, a Boston area subway stored value card. I know that it is available only at selected location. Luckily the MBTA website has a sales location look up page , or so I thought.

This webpage present a select list of cities and towns, with a single action button for “Find Sale Locations”. I picked the town closest to me, click the button, and got a message “No sales location is available for the area”. Try again. Same thing. This webpage is asking me to find a town that has a sale location by trial and error, instead of filtering the list box to only contain towns that have a sales location.

You can watch this video to see how bad the UX is, or just try it yourself on the website. How can a developer not understand that this is a terrible user experience? How can a product owner agree to this implementation? Do you have UX like this within your product?