So I'm giving Weight Watcher's a try. Normally I wouldn't share such information, but I'm so frustrated with them that I need to share. These are only my initial impressions. We'll see how I feel in a few weeks.

It's just slow. The site regularly timed out or was very slow. Resubmitting a given form or reclicking a link sometimes sped things up.

The web site is bad at guiding potential customers. I spent a modest amount of time looking around, and I never found a clear, "this is what you want" page. The closet you get is the not terribly specific The Plan page with links at the bottom. The links aren't helpfully labelled, "Do you want to attend local meetings, or work online?"

So I go to a meeting, sign up, and pay. Except I haven't really signed up. I need to log in online and re-register. Then I'll print out a temporary ID and they'll mail me the "real" one. Why can't this be handled at their store frontage?

The site demands that credit card numbers be entered without spaces. That's just stupid.

The field for entering my street address is too short. I should be able to see my entire address at once.

The subscription agreement is too long. Is five pages of contract really necessary? Back before they were so internet heavy, I'm confident they weren't dropping that much contract on their customers. Given the length, I'm confident the majority of their customers aren't reading it.

Come to think of it, why am I now agreeing to five pages of contract? I paid back at the store.

Those five pages of contract are initially presented in a little frame, showing about one paragraph of text, requiring lots and lots of scrolling to read.

Their contract is silly. There are "trade secrets" involved? I'm pretty sure if you're presenting information to millions of customers, it's no longer a trade secret.

The contract contains things I'm quite confident wouldn't stand up in court. My sole remedy in any dispute is to cancel my account? I think not.

The contract claims that I'm liable if a third party runs up charges using my credit card. I'm quite sure my credit card company will disagree with that. That this is even a risk suggests that they're willing to charge new charges (beyond the monthly fee) to my credit card on file. Can I opt out of that, because it's a bad idea? If I want to buy someting new, reconfirm my credit card number.

Between taking quite some time to read the overly long contract, then waiting The site is so slow that my attempt to sign up timed out, forcing me to restart from the beginning.

Why are the DIRECTIONS AND ADDRESS IN ALL CAPS? It's the twenty-first century now, we can use lower case.

So I'm finally set up, and I'm excited that they offer some software for Palm devices. Having their database of food and being able to track things on a device that I carry with me all the time anyway. No such luck. The software really wants to link to their web site. That's no good since I almost never HotSync. Even if I was willing, I'm not able; the only two operating systems in my apartment at Linux and MacOS X, neither of which is supported. I tried using Wine to run the Windows binary, but it refused me access since I didn't have the Palm Desktop installed and working.

So, has anyone else written something that might be a suitable tool? Yes, there's a free tool called WWJournal. Oops, Weight Watchers shut it down. It's typical scare letter that overgeneralizes WW's side of the situation and fails to point out that the tool's author could have continued to develop the software; he just needed to be careful to skirt WW's trademarks. Unfortunately the letter had its intended effect and killed off some valuable software. (I did eventually track down a copy, but regrettably since it hasn't been updated it's not much use.)

Finally, I try using the web site to figure out my points for my first day. It's still painfully slow. They have a new Flash based interface that takes forever to load. I'm having difficulty finding entries for things I had. Isn't the web site backed with their entire database? Doesn't that database have decades of research? Why are the only entries for "mocha whole" from for Starbuck's tall size? How do I adjust for different sizes? I can find rice crispies treat (under the slightly hard to find "crisp rice and marshmallow treat"), but it's only for "small." What's small? I have no idea.

Because the web is generally more convenient to me than a pair of books, I'm going to stick with the painfully slow web site. But I'm stuck with abusing the memos in my Palm and not getting any useful automatic calculations.

The local branch and the online site have zero connection. I have to tell the site information the local branch already knows. The local branch expects me to carry about a little piece of paper with my history and bring it to each meeting. The web site knows nothing about the little piece of paper.

Perhaps unsurprisingly I'm pretty displeased with Weight Watchers right now. This is an international corporation with decades of experience. Why does their online face suck so badly? The only ray of hope is that the plan itself seems reasonable and their meetings seem promising. I'm hoping that the problem is a long history of being technology free and that the non-technical aspects are much better. It seems reasonable given that their primary audience appears to be pretty non-technical people, and they high for local staff from their customer base. Absent a techie crowd to get promoted up, it may be that there is no one to beat their technical flaws into shape.

(2007-03-15: Tweaks and clairifications.)