Dunkin’ Donuts has been trying to convert in-store customers to registered users. A month ago, I gave their set-up a try. The site looks great, but my experience was disappointing.

The Dunkin' Donuts account registration process looks attractive but doesn't work well.

I documented my experience via an annotated screenshot, and sent it off to the Dunkin’ Donuts support team (eDCP@ddnedc.com) with the following email:

“Dear Dunkin’ Donuts,

I am writing to let you know about a highly unsatisfactory interaction I had with your website this afternoon. I ate at a local DD store today, and afterward decided to fill out the online feedback survey at TellDunkin.com, since the staff at the store had been excellent.

The survey went fine, and at the end, I was prompted to sign up for the Dunkin’ perks program. What a user experience nightmare! No matter what I tried in order to sign up, including multiple web browsers, I could not register. Every email address I tried was rejected by the system as already being tied to an existing perks account.

I have taken the time to capture and annotate some screen images of the buggy processes I experienced today. I hope you will take the time to review them, and to respond to me with some concrete information about why this happened, and how it is being resolved.

Thank you in advance…”

I never heard anything back, but I now receive weekly emails from Dunkin’ Donuts encouraging me to complete my profile so that I can get the most out of the DD Perks program. I even made another fruitless attempt to get registered.

Unfortunately, the otherwise lively, attractive, well-designed Dunkin’ Donuts website belies a total system that, at least for me, was less than functional.

CNN is reporting the “situation” as breaking news. What happened? A hacker? A massive snafu? Rolling blackouts? In fact, this was planned maintenance. Every site will have some unavoidable, hopefully planned, downtime. While it’s rare for a site the size of Twitter to be down for all users during the middle of the day, apparently Twitter found it necessary today. Such outages are usually announced in advance, as was the case at Twitter today (http://status.twitter.com). As seen in the screen capture below, today’s site-wide outage was publicly announced yesterday. I suppose most users don’t read the Twitter Status page. Maybe a heads-up on the home page would have communicated the issue more effectively.

Unable to connect with anyone quickly, and not finding any direct connections via my LinkedIn account, my brother advised me to blog about it here on my site. I have since deleted the contents of that post, as the issue has now been addressed and I don’t see any positive purpose in leaving the post up.

Late this evening, Boston time, I was able to speak with PBworks’ PR chief, who was probably less than thrilled to be getting a dinnertime cellphone call from some chick on the East Coast wanting to tug his ear about a suspect UX encounter (every site has bugs; it’s not a big secret!). But he was gracious and attentive, and a few minutes later I got a call back from the founder of PBworks.

These guys took my concerns seriously, listened to my bug description, and got QA on it straight away. Basically just what you’d hope to find out about a big player–that they care about the individual users and about making the user experience safe, secure, and comfortable for all.

I feel confident that the issue I picked up on is being addressed and that my account information is safe in PBworks’ hands.

Now if only PBworks could handle all my non-profit fundraising itself, and not just the information management of it…