Hi Randy:

I raise this here because FT is listed as a sponsor / backer of the Frequent Traveler Awards, which Hilton HHonors urged me to participate in by sending me an email. I sure tried.

The drag-and-drop interface respondents use to select and rank their favorite programs is completely faulty. The user is given a nominees' list on the left side of the screen and a black column on the right; we're supposed to drag our favorites from left to right, then manipulate the right-side selections until they're in the 1-to-4 order we want, then hit submit. When the user mouses over a nominee, a large explanatory popover appears.

Frequently, I found, a nominee on the left couldn't be dragged to the right. When it could, it would mysteriously appear twice -- "doubled." Try to drag one back to the left side, back where it came from, and it would disappear altogether. The caption popovers are big and intrusive and obscure the primary interface, so you can't see what you're doing. Selections on the right side could not be re-ordered, so it was impossible to stack favorites in 1-ot-4 order. And hitting page reload or "back" buttons did nothing to clean things up or reset the ballot screen.

I finally submitted my selections after wrestling with the interface for many long minutes, but I can tell you they were wholly scrambled and not representative of the votes I wanted to cast, and I think the system must be receiving a lot of scrambled, suspect data or incomplete ballots.

The irony is, for a simple stack-rank voting exercise, this is so simple an interface to pull off with clickable buttons... but someone got fancy, or tried to, with Flash and popovers and so on, and the result is a usability (and data-corruption) nightmare. Any travel provider who doesn't win recognition will be able to point to this interface and say: Well, maybe we DID win. Who knows, with this drag-and-drop deal malfunctioning like this? Goodness knows more than one provider I tried to vote for won't show up on my "ballot."

I hate to see you and FT associated with an exercise that's designed so poorly and I fear will yield very random results that deserve our skepticism.