Sounds simple and innocuous enough, right? Well, I clicked on the link to respond to the "4 questions," and was taken to a web page on the Booking.com page. Want to see what "4 questions" looks like? Have a look below.
Turns out, they present you with 12 questions, organized into 4 groups. This kind of deceptive practices really turns me off. I think Booking.com has lost at least one customer — me.

The following is an example of really, really bad user experience design.

Today I renewed our maka.lu domain with EuroDNS. The confirmation email I received contained this lead-in text, prefixed by exclamation points:

Please note that for domains where contact information is not complete, the processing is blocked until all information is available for the domain in question. 

How should I interpret this? Should I consider it an alert — by its very presence, should I assume that my contact information is not complete? Should I further assume that my renewal order is blocked? I've checked the contact records, and as far as I can see, they are complete — but how can I know for sure?

I'm left assuming this text was meant to be informational only — but this is terrible, terrible, terrible experience design. It causes confusion and uncertainty, and in the best of cases causes the waste of time.

Such text should only be present in the case that the particular domain's contact information is actually incomplete; otherwise, leave it out.

While searching for a hotel the other day, I came across the following display, which raised a couple of UI/UX alarms:

Hotels are, in general, rated one through five stars -- which are meant to reflect the price range, the scope of amenities to expect, etc. The number of stars that a hotel has doesn't necessarily reflect an expectation of *quality*; for example, I've been to some great two-star hotels.

At the same time, websites that provide customer ratings also generally use a five-star rating system, in which case the number of stars *is* intended to communicate a level of quality.

At the above site, where I found the Hotel Mora, their intention is to communicate that the hotel is a two-star hotel. In communicating this, they try to also communicate that the maximum number of stars a hotel can have is five. They do this by displaying two filled stars, within a row of five otherwise hollow stars. 

The problem, obviously, is that most visitors will be used to seeing this visual convention used at most rating sites, and may, therefore and unfortunately, perceive this to be a relatively low-quality hotel.

My company, Makalu Interactive, operates the websites for Rock-am-Ring — Germany's largest summer music festival. The website receives a lot of traffic — well over 500,000 page-views per day.

This afternoon I was taking a look at the mobile device analytics, and plotted the mobile traffic sources (almost all traffic is from Germany):

Some interesting observations:

1. Clearly the iPhone dominates with almost 70% of the mobile traffic. 
2. The traffic from all Apple devices (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) represents over 80% of the mobile traffic. 
3. Traffic from the newly-launched iPad is twice that of the BlackBerry, and 40% that of all Android devices.

For more interesting tidbits, be sure to follow me on Twitter.

Twitterfeed is a service that can automatically tweet new content announced via RSS feeds. So if you have a blog, you can have Twitterfeed *subscribe* to your blog, and tweet each time you post. It's very convenient.

Unfortunately, their user-interface design is a bit confusing.

I have Twitterfeed tracking three RSS feeds — my blog, my posterous, and a particular Flickr photo set. Recently, I decided that I wanted to temporarily *disable* the tracking of my blog.

Clicking "Edit" on my blog feed, I disabled the "Active" button:

Completing the steps, and returning to the dashboard, however, there's no apparent indication that my feed has been disabled:

So, I return to edit the feed, and on step 2, I additionally disable the Twitter "Active" checkbox:

The dashboard now looks like this:

I presume everything's OK now — "Twitter" is grayed out on my blog feed, but remains active on my Polaroids feed.

Unfortunately, though, recent updates to my other feeds (in particular, the Posterous feed), haven't been published — so I'm now wondering whether disabling the "mhenders" Twitter destination in one feed, also disables it as a destination in all other feeds.

This is very confusing, and I hope they clear this up.

(BTW, if anyone from Twitterfeed is reading this, I know of a very good UI/UX design firm that would love to help design a great UI model your wonderful service! http://makalumedia.com/interactive )

At OpenSRS (which apart from occasionally not seeming too interested in user interface design, is an otherwise *fantastic* registrar), when registering a new domain, you eventually end up on a screen containing a long confirmation form which includes the domain details, the various contact records, the DNS servers, the domain settings, etc.

The screen is long, and requires scrolling to the very end in order to complete the process by clicking the "Submit" button:

The problem here is that the "Submit" button is hidden between a drop-down menu, and a button (that I'll bet *nobody* has ever pressed intentionally) called "Restore Values".

But guess what button is prominently displayed, all alone and just *so* easy to press at the very end of the screen — "Logout". (I'll bet that was the first button you saw when looking at that image.) How many websites have you ever visited, on which the login service was at the *bottom* of the page, instead of the upper right hand corner of the page?

And guess which button I've accidentally pressed a million times in the process of registering domains — yes, "Logout". And guess which button doesn't ask for confirmation of your action — yes, "Logout". Click, boom, you're out — registration process cancelled.

Of course, once I've logged out, I have to start the entire five-step process over again.

Update: I had a nice chat with Fred Smith this afternoon, and they've taken immediate action to resolve the issue. Bravo. Thanks, Fred!

Some months ago, I applied for a trademark registration. My application was returned by the USPTO, reporting some corrections needing to be made. The USPTO letter was nearly unintelligible, which probably explains why I immediately started receiving letters from law firms offering their services in resolving the application deficiiencies.

One such letter was from Trademarkia.com. I went to their website, completed and submitted their registration form, including my credit card number to cover the cost of their service.

When I didn't receive a confirmation email, I decided to write, and here's the transcript of the communications with them:

Me, on April 6:

I believe that I've purchased the $139 package on Trademarkia.com; however, I didn't receive a confirmation. Can you please check? Email address on the account is ...

Two days later — Fred Smith from Trademarkia.com, on April 8:

Our team is currently working on your application and we have a normal turn around time of 3 weeks to file an OA response.

Three weeks later — me, on April 28:

Could you please provide a status update on my OA response? I believe there's only a few days left before the deadline.

Today — Fred Smith from Trademarkia.com, on April 29:

Our records show that you have not ordered the Office Action Response Standard Package. If you need assistance in the application process one of our Customer Sales Representatives would be glad to assist you at our toll free number 1 (877) 794-9511.