confused.com? You will be...

My car insurance is due this month, leaving me with that magical four years no claims that most insurance companies seem to love. So I went to confused.com to give it a go.

I used my iPod Touch as I didn't want to boot the laptop, and maybe this contributed to the frustrating experience, but if a website can't support Safari then that's hardly my problem really.

It didn't start well as the Get Quotes button was floating at the bottom of the page rather than in line with everything else, but it was about to get worse. The site didn't recognise my registration number so I had to manually enter my car details. This is the first site that has failed to find my car from the number plate, and I've used a number of them for looking for insurance and tyres before.

Then I was asked for my occupation, and although it didn't recognise Software Developer it did seem to pick up Programmer. Well, it was listed as Computer Programmer in the list so I selected that and tried to continue. That was no good for it though, I had to type in my occupation so that it matched what I selected in the drop down list. Further frustrations...

Eventually I get to the last screen on which I'm asked to enter a password so I can retrieve my details later. So I enter a password only to be told it isn't good enough. Passwords have to be between 6 and 8 characters apparently...

So I entered in a password that matched this criteria only to be told it still wasn't good enough. I gave up at that point, as a user of web applications I expect better.

As a developer of web applications I know the whole experience can be much better.

What's the point of heavily advertising your service if you confuse your would be customers before you've convinced them to part with any money?

So, after being thoroughly disappointed with that experience I'm just going to stay with my current insurer.