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You have an E-purse reload item for this card in your shopping cart. Please remove it or complete checkout before adding more.

Seattle public transit has a unified payment system called ORCA. if you use the light rail, there are convenient reload kiosks at ~every station, but if you primarily take the bus, you might not have any kiosks on your daily commute path. fortunately, you can reload your card online, so let's do that. and, since you're probably thinking about this while on the bus, you'll be using your phone to complete this flow.

what could go wrong? let's find out:

Page with a dialog prompting you for a card number and security code

when you open the page, it immediately spawns a modal dialog to prompt you for a "card number".
the only clarification that this is the ORCA card number and not your credit card number is in a neighboring image. hopefully you're not visually impaired!

Page displaying an image of your ORCA card and two accordion sections, named E-Purse and Passes

the next page has no buttons and no input fields immediately visible. there is nothing here that visually scans as an "Add Funds" option; you have to explore the accordion sections to find a way to pay.

Success dialog after choosing how much money to add

found it! let's go to checkout...

Warning under the 'Add money' form that says 'You have an E-purse reload item for this card in your shopping cart. Please remove it or complete checkout before adding more.'

...but first, the page briefly warns you to remove the reload item from your shopping cart. why???
before you can finish processing this bizarre request, you get thrown onto another page with an even more severe error message:

Shopping cart page, with an error message that says 'This order requires contact information.'

we're supposedly on the "happy path" to checking out, but the website's visual language has now told us twice in a row that we've done something wrong.
this time, you have to open the mandatory modal yourself to proceed.

Contact information form in another dialog, which requires a first name, last name, and email address (plus optional phone number) everyone who uses public transit has an email address, right?
'Add payment method and checkout' section with a 'Place order' button

the naming of the "Place Order" button seems to suggest that this is the end of the checkout flow, even though the surrounding messaging clearly states otherwise.

A visually distinct payment form on another website

we're now on our fourth distinct form of the checkout process, hosted on a completely different website. at least the information we already provided on the last form is auto-filled here.

in summary: I have never felt so lost trying to pay for something online. this is a public service meant to be accessible to an entire city's population, including people who are definitely not tech-literate enough to navigate this maze of a website. this entire payment flow could've been two forms with zero modals or confusing error messages. just an absolute mess

Older post 19 of 25 Newer post