Hi,
Frustrations I’ve experienced in the last 24 hours while using the website are listed below. While some likely have a common cause in overly aggressive caching, I didn’t want to just spam the forum with a half-dozen threads on broadly similar themes, so I just compiled the list into a single post.
- I followed a link from a Huel employee on Reddit to read a post about low carb diets on the website. My goal was to consume static content. The website, with a marquee at the top of the page, seemed to have other plans. I found the constantly moving text unnecessary. I can understand (if not appreciate) having it in some sections of the website - but the page above has 13 paragraphs of moderately accessible… sciencing. It’s really not the place for an ever-moving distraction imho.
- Within the last few minutes I placed what your website calls #H0C4YYGYK and what the email you sent to me refers to as #738462-EU. Why does one order have multiple IDs?
- Each time I added something to my cart, a large pop-up would appear that I would need to click away. Considering the website at one point forgot I had things in my cart and I had to start over, I’d say I was probably presented with that pop-up ten times. Rather annoying - never once actually wanted to see it.
- When I was placing my order a few minutes ago, the checkout page had a prompt to sign in. Clicking on the link would dump me on my Account Page, where I was already signed in. This was repeatable.
- When I decided to proceed with my order despite having Schrödinger’s authentication status, the order confirmation page offered to allow me to register an account. Being someone that already has one, it immediately told me the account registration process it specifically encouraged me to undertake had failed due to the email address being in use. I don’t know whether this is a Shopify issue or a caching issue or what, but being told “hey, you should do this” only to immediately be told “lol attempt rejected” is a bad time - ideally, the customer wouldn’t be encouraged to do something that won’t be accepted.
- Today’s order didn’t appear in my Order History page until a few minutes later. I don’t think this is, in a vacuum, problematic - but it reinforces my strong suspicion that there is some moderate-duration cache policy being applied globally without regard for what is being cached (log in status; previous orders). So while I wouldn’t otherwise list it as a problem, in this post I’m including it as a suspected symptom.
- I don’t actually know what’s in my order. Last week with order #734639-EU I spent more on scoops, shakers, and reusable hot pots than I would have done intentionally - the store mentioned that it would include a welcome kit with freebies… unless it chose not to include a welcome kit. I have previously placed orders but none in the last 2 years, so I wasn’t sure how the “must be a new customer” criterion would be interpreted in that context. As that order is unfortunately running late, I still don’t know for certain if the welcome kit was ultimately included. Tonight the checkout page explicitly prompted me to choose a size for the free t-shirt; but given that it was confused about whether I was logged in, I have no idea whether the t-shirt will be in the box or if it’s just the website being unreliable.
- I am manually putting link text in bold because the forum doesn’t differentiate link text from non-link text. I know this isn’t a preview pane bug as an existing post of mine is affected. This is bewildering - as web browsers will, by default, use underlining and different font colours to convey text is a link and need to be specifically told not to do that - which is typically used to change how links will be displayed (e.g. bold text; different font-family). Someone at Huel appears to have instead decided that you should need to mouse-over every individual word in every individual post to check whether it’s a link? Truly baffling stuff.
Apart from being needlessly frustrating to the average person, this is an accessibility disaster.