I’m looking to take my family back to Dave and Busters (it’s been quite a while) for some family fun. I have one of their “power cards,” which is where game play credits are stored.  Before we head out, I wanted to check the balance on the card – simple enough, right? Wrong.

Turns out, visiting DaveandBusters.com was a frustrating experience and a lesson in weak site design and usability.  Finding the site was easy (thanks to the new Google predictive results feature – see video). What is interesting is that even after watching annoying flash commercials and fumbling through inadequate navigation, the answer was to call an 888 number and leave a voice message with personal information for some woman in the “corporate office”.

Welcome to the age where databases are hooked to websites and user experience is important.  Here’s the 5 min video, “Dave and Busters – a lesson in designing for the user.”