mikewhobikes

While shopping for books I often use the “wish list” feature to keep track of potential purchases. Today I found that my wish list on chapters.indigo.ca was several months old and no longer contained any books I wanted.

My goal? To empty the wish list so I could start fresh.

Here’s what I tried:

1. I scanned for an “Empty” or “Remove All” button. No such luck.
2. A “Remove” link is provided next to each item. Clicking one revealed that it requires a full page refresh. That’s going to take much too long; there must be a better option.
3. I know! I’ll set the quantity of each item to 0 and then update. This is common behaviour to shopping carts, which is essentially what this wish list is.

Here’s the message I received after setting the quantities to zero and updating:

The developers clearly understand I was attempting to remove items, yet they refuse to help me. Instead it’s suggested that I “simply click the Remove button”. How simple would it be with a list of 20 items? 100? They could code the logic to make this work properly in less time.

The lesson here is that for every error message you write it’s useful to quickly ask “Could I help the user instead of giving them this message?” If the message is a workaround, do it for the user instead of telling them how.