Why is an intuitive UI important?

I recently used American Express Travel to book a vacation for my wife and I. We are celebrating her 30th birthday. I have a ton of points so I wanted to book an awards travel. Seems simple enough. I've used points before to rent a car; I recall a slight hassle back then, but hey, I wanted to use my points.

So, here is the issue. We live in a world of simplicity. Everywhere you look, interfaces get easier and easier to use. Online banking, dinner reservations, email, its all super easy because that is what users have demanded. When I run across poorly designed web pages at work, I make it a point to fix it; time permitting. If it sucks bad enough, it will get fixed sooner rather than later. If it just plain doesn't work at all you can bet that Crash will be asking WTF?

American Express is a reputable company with a lot of resources. I recently worked with their international team on a credit card interface and it went very smooth. Needless to say I was shocked to find that they had such a poor interface for booking rewards travel. I assumed the site would be perfect because of their name; that was a poor assumption.

I'll try to explain the experience:

Here is the Membership rewards area where I'm applying 19k points to my hotel reservation. As soon as you click the "Redeem the full balance" radio button, the "Amount credited to your Card" is updated on the right and is highlighted in yellow. Seems simple right? I'll get back to this one in a minute.



Section #3 is where it asks you to select a method of payment. I was using my points, but wanted to pay with a Visa. So, I selected Visa, plugged in my data and moved on. Everything seemed normal, no surprises.





Once I processed the reservation request, an error occurred. The error stated that I did not provide the Card Identification Number for my Amex. I was not paying with my Amex, why do they need it? Also, I noticed that the "Use Another Card" option was gone. Had I been doing this in Firefox I would have used firebug to see exactly what was going on. The last annoyance was that the data I mentioned earlier with the "Amount credited to your Card" was wrong. It no longer reflected the credit I was getting by using my points, yet the radio button was selected.

This smells like poor state management. Why have the values not persisted through this round trip?

My wife was wanting me off the computer, both babies were crying and I was in a hurry so, like user that was just introduced to the Internet, I clicked proceed with the reservation. Can you guess what happened? They charged my Amex, not my VISA. WTF? I'm pissed that this happened. Not because it absolutely had to be the Visa, but because I wanted it to be the Visa and I didn't get what I wanted even though I was very deliberate with my intentions.

I posted about this on Twitter and shortly after I received a customer satisfaction survey. I'm not sure that was related but I was glad to give them some feedback.