I got up at the crack o’ 10:45 am on Thanksgiving morning to try and get a $100 xBox 360 from Amazon.com. They only had 1000 at that price, going on sale at 11:00am sharp, and virtually every video game blog in the Universe had reported on it. So it was going to be tough.

I got 4 web browser windows open, tiled on my Apple Cinema Display, and I refreshed them all sequentially, trying to be one of the lucky few. I really didn’t think I would be.

But come 11:00am, one of my 4 browser windows popped up with the $100 offer. It said something like “congratulations”, or something like that. I clicked the “get one” button.

Amazon then asked me a security question. Not a big deal, except it was asking me to add two double-digit numbers. I’m very poor with math computation -- I’ve been known to resort to finger counting -- so I was not lightning fast on this part.

I entered them in and hit return. The page immediately came back saying I entered the answer incorrectly, and it offered up another math question. I added them up again, pressed enter, and AGAIN got the error message with a new security question. I was adding them correctly, but something was wrong, so this time I opened the Windows calculator (the geeky shortcut for this is Start -> Run, then type “calc” and press return).

I totaled them up on my calculator and entered the number, but I decided to scroll down and hit the Submit button instead of pressing return. And that’s when I saw the stupid little “I agree to the Terms and Conditions” checkbox, which was sitting just off the edge of my browser window (which was roughly 600 pixels tall). So, by now you can guess what happened. When I submitted it, I got the “We’re sorry!, that item is no longer available at that price!” answer.

So, a string of bad UI here.

I’m all in favor of CAPTCHA security questions, but adding two double-digit numbers together on what is clearly going to be a time-critical operation is downright mean, because frankly I’m a bit slow at that, and others are too. In a situation like this there’s lots of creative CAPTCHA tests Amazon could have implemented that didn’t require math. For example, identifying a photo of the xBox 360 from a group of product photos.

Furthermore, not having the correct error message displayed was a major goof on Amazon’s part. It should have told me I had to agree to the terms and conditions, instead of claiming I got the security question wrong. My browser window was small, but it’s wasn’t that small.

I never felt I had a chance at getting one of the $100 xBox 360s, but when I got to the security question screen, I thought for sure I had secured one. It was a major letdown to go through 3 rounds of trying to get the question right only to have my hopes dashed. After that, I wasn’t even in the mood to make a hand turkey.

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