No Pizza for You: Bad Website Design at Pizzahut.com
I’m a systems analyst and deal with complex software every day. However I’m still amazed when companies release bad code on their customers. Case in point: Pizzahut.com
I received an email from Pizza Hut offering their Panormous Pizza for $10. I happened to be lazy and hungry at that very moment and clicked on the “Order Now” button in the HTML. As the site loaded I notice that the URL was passing several knapsacks (marketing and order variables) to the site. I was then prompted to login. For some reason the website for ordering pizza has a login that is more restrictive than most. If you screw up either your login ID or password it doesn’t tell you which you entered wrong; it just says “login incorrect”. After a few attempts at remembering my login ID and password for a fast-food website, I figure out the combo – and the real fun begins.
First I’m presented with a screen after the login that shows my “hometown Pizza Hut” – the closest store to my home – correctly and asks if I want carryout or delivery. I select carryout because I may be lazy but I’m also cheap; having worked as a pizza delivery guy in my youth I always tip them well – so most of the time I pick up the orders myself. The next screen I’m prompted to select the location nearest my house and presented with a Microsoft Virtual Earth satellite view of my neighborhood complete with all the Pizza Huts in southeastern PA and northern DE shown with tiny Pizza Hut icons. But my “hometown pizza hut” was displayed correctly on the previous page. Why am I being asked to select it again? I do it anyway.
By this time I notice that all the knapsack information is gone. The site doesn’t know that I want the Panormous Pizza for $10 – so I have to find it. Is it a featured product? Nope. It sure isn’t a Tuscani Pasta. After clicking on various tabs I finally find it hidden under “Pick Your Crust”. The Panormous is not a crust – it’s a pizza. So what is it doing there? Now I’m not just hungry, I feel hungry AND like I’m still at the office.
The website allows you to customize the toppings per pizza – but the Panormous is actually two separate pizzas packaged together. Each pizza can have a separate topping but I can either double my order or have both pizzas be the same topping. The page is confusing and offers too many choices (why? I’m ordering a pizza, not building a house) – but the page cannot handle two pizzas, two different toppings, one price. To make matters worse the Panormous is showing up at regularly price, not the $10 promised in the email.
I search the website and find a phone number to call. I speak to a woman who mispronounces my name after I’ve spelled it twice. I explain my trouble with the site and ask her how to order a pizza on the website. Her solution? “Call the store and place your order over the phone. Do you want the number?” I mention that they will need a coupon code to complete the order (I’ve actually gone through this before a long time ago). She said that the website may not be displaying correctly because the store doesn’t offer the pizza. I laughed. “You don’t really know, do you?” I said and hung up. Now I’m not only hungry, I’m really annoyed.
I find a feedback form and start typing away in the memo section… And run out of space. The memo field is limited to 520 characters including line breaks – that’s about 80 words or so.
I call my “hometown pizza hut” in desperation and they hook me up – no problem.
The whole ordering online process is a mess. It clearly hasn’t been quality tested thoroughly. It seems laid out more for product placement and advertising than it does for ordering products. In fairness to the web designers they probably did what they were paid to do. The site requirements came from the marketing department where everybody thought about how cool the site looked and nobody considered its purpose. Had they actually tried to order a pizza the errors would have been easily apparent. A round of QA would have kept this multimillion dollar firm from releasing one of the worst websites I’ve used that doesn’t have a URL that ends in .gov.
In the Grand Scheme of things the failure of this website means little, but it doesn’t take much to do a decent website in the year 2009.
Chad:
Now, this is funny.
3 April 2009, 10:58 amWe ordered from Pizza Hut last night, and had the same issues, Tina finally just called the place. I will say, the quality of their pizza is much better now, and the price for what we got was great compared to most of the other pizza chains.
Kelly:
Maybe the website felt the frustration of the cooks that have to make that horrible pizza. I’ll be sure glad when that demon pizza dies.
4 April 2009, 2:34 amDerek:
I couldn’t agree more. Pizza hut’s website has to be one of the most terrible collections of code I’ve seen on the web. They should really take a queue from Papa John’s, whose website is neatly organized, and functions as it should.
23 May 2010, 12:26 pmScott:
What’s really sick is somebody, probably an offshore development house, made a lot of money and is proud of the this useless pile of rubbish that poses as a website.
18 February 2012, 9:37 pmGreta:
Do you happen to know what program they use to make the “pizza builder?
9 April 2012, 3:50 pmJordan:
You should see the new pizzahut.ca, It’s barely functional(Being generous here)
They put out a new version a while back, and it’s nearly impossible for me to order a pizza. After attempting to log in an and getting a descriptive “Something went wrong” popup a few times, I switched over to IE and was able to log in.
After logging in I was greeted with several extremely slow forms one after another, after clicking next and waiting 5 seconds for the website to respond to my input I was on to the next form! And the next… and the next…
So finally I made it to the pizza customization form, where creating a 4 topping pizza took much longer than it should have. I click to add a topping, again waiting 5 to 10 seconds for the website to respond, and repeat for the rest of my toppings. The input for selecting the amount of this pizza you want to add to your order is grayed out and un-editable so I click add to order and repeat this painful process for our second pizza.
Going through the checkout process is fairly quick, even with the excruciatingly slow button responses. I choose debit as a payment method, click next, wait, review my order and place the order… “OOPS SOMETHING WENT WRONG” I’m booted back to where I started, having to fill out the several slow forms at the beginning again. After going through this long process again my order goes through! Yay!? NO! My local pizza hut guy calls me up and says they don’t have a driver and I’ll have to go pick it up, I just politely say never mind and hang up.
It took me an hour to order a pizza and they didn’t even have a driver tonight…
1 May 2012, 12:01 amScott Kirwin:
Jordan
1 May 2012, 11:35 amSince posting this I’ve actually quit going to Pizza Hut. I’ve found that the pizza tastes better at local restaurants often run by new immigrants to the United States (how a Turk and a Pakistani manage to make great pizza is beyond me, but they do.) They don’t take orders over the internet, but I can get exactly what I want in a 20 second phone call. Old school but effective.
Russell:
I was trying to leave the following complaint after using the website but it turns out leaving complaints is impossible. So i’m so pissed off right now, i need someone somewhere to read this and maybe theres a small chance someone who works for pizza hut will hear this…
Website is not usable, i wasnt able to get prices for food, when i tried to select my store for the price an error pops up, something about the code not working, then it takes you back to the homepage, happened FOUR TIMES so i gave up.
I am a website designer so i know how to use a website, its not my fault in case your going to pass this off as just another noob not knowing what there doing.
Then I try calling, the contact number provided: 1300 749 924 does not work. i get no response, no ring, nothing. So I cant even place an order over the phone? (but in the end 131166 worked, but this number isn’t displayed anywhere on the website, so i did get pizza in the end)
When I try looking up my store (ringwood) it does not provide a contact number. I can not make an order whatsoever online.. How the hell do you expect the average PC user to figure this out?
its very annoying, you wasted sooooo much money on a website that DOES NOT WORK and you cant even get the phone contact information right?
And another thing, even leaving this complaint is near impossible, where the hell is the scroll bar to go up and down on this page? After trying to figure it out I stumbled across click the screen and dragging down as if to highlight text… That is extremely poor design.
Actually, it is impossible to leave a complaint, i try to click submit and it asks me to fill out my “store name” and some other fields, but these fields do not exist.
Russell
11 June 2012, 4:20 amBh:
I thought the website at Pizza Hut was the most confusing, difficult to use, and any business exec that believes it is facilitating business or the customer is as screwed up as the site. Then I encountered the order by phone reroute to the “call center”. This happened twice and once was to Florida and the other routed to a man in Dallas, I am in Ohio.both times the order was screwed up. The second time it took me 15 minutes to order 4 medium pepperoni and cheese pizzas. The guy from Dallas may have been disabled be as he could not get this complex order correct, he repeated things over and over, and kept getting it wrong, talking over me when I corrected him to no avail. I am all for hiring an integrating disabled persons, bit if you are deaf, you have coomunication problems, or the complexity of a 4 pizza order is too great, the position may not be for this person. If the guy was just incompetent then the guy isn’t right for the position. When the order is screwed up, ho do you call. The first time I had to wait 20 minutes in the parking lot for the locals to fix it, this time I got home to open the box to see it was wrong. When I called, I got the call center somewhere far away so I just gave up. I can only say this is good for the mom and pop pizza joints cuz Pizza Hut makes time warner look costumer friendly. I think I am done with Pizza Hut that is a quarter mile from my home, I will travel farther for the better service at the local mom and pop
22 May 2016, 8:16 am