St Pete, FL Web Developer
I’ve been knocking around a blog post idea for the past week or so about how much media and information I consume. I wanted to talk about how my consumption compares to people just 20 years ago — books, music, articles, movies, television, advertisements, games, etc.
Well, this isn’t that post. It’s a heady topic and I don’t feel I could do it justice.
So this is the post to say that I had the idea, and it was a good one, but it’s not going to happen right now.
Last year my wife and I bought a new fridge. It’s big, it’s black and it holds a lot of food — it was everything we needed. It’s a single-door bottom-freezer unit and we’re very happy with it, especially when we remember what it replaced, but there’s something that’s been driving me crazy about it since the day it arrived…
Right in front are the temperature controls for both the fridge and the freezer that are pretty straight forward. Simple up-and-down arrows and a big digital display for each — a child could figure this out, right?
But wait… is the freezer just barely colder than the refrigerator? No, that can’t be right — if that were true either my milk would be freezing or my ice would be melting… and besides, both defaults are 4. Yeah, everything’s fine — that’s a relief!
No. This is stupid! I should never have had to go through that thought process and my wife shouldn’t have had to ask me about it.
The designers are encouraging comparison by putting the fridge and freezer temperature controls right next to each other, but they’re using the same scale of abstracted measurement for two very different temperatures. ’4′ shouldn’t mean 32° mere inches from where it means 60°. I get that the designers would have had constraints, but I would prefer it if they either used a fixed unit of measurement (Fahrenheit or Celsius) or split the controls by putting one in the refrigerator and one in the freezer.
One more gripe that might support my latter suggestion, do these controls have to be right up front and in the middle? Do users have to adjust the temperature enough to compromise clearance? Don’t get me wrong, I like my fridge, but the controls are confusing and I can barely fit bottles in the middle — it’s a pain in the ass.
Please don't judge my cluttered fridge
For years, everyone even tangentially involved in marketing has been telling companies that they need to reach out and meet their customers with social media. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, whatever. Engage, engage, engage. Let them know you’re listening and get them talking, but control the message.
Well, congratulations to all us consultants, project managers and designers because, for better or for worse, the marketing guys are here.
My wife and I recently resubscribed to cable TV after a couple years hiatus. (She’s 8 months pregnant and insists it’s now a necessity.) One of first commercials that really caught my attention was for the AmEx Rewards program. I’ve always thought their marketing was classy, and this commercial was no exception, but the tone was completely different than what it used to be. It seems more casual, approachable, and conversational. Throughout the 30-some seconds, tweets are shown about what customers (real or fake, I couldn’t say) are spending their points on:
Ingenious. Not only are they “one of us” (a big departure from the My Life, My Card strategy a few years back), but all of our “friends” are excitedly talking about how awesome AmEx is!
One of the very funniest commercials I’ve seen all year is for the Toyota Venza:
It’s funny and it speaks to a very complex audience. Not only does it target a mature market that sees little-to-no value in Facebook, but it also taps into the more moderate social media user. You know — normal people that don’t find gratification in a number that attempts to quantify my social worth. (Yeah… I count myself among the second group described.)
One of the things I struggle with is the gamification of social media. I’ve mentioned it here before, but I really can’t stand the fabrication of an online persona to win followers or friends. It’s made me very distrustful. I don’t hesitate to remove “friends” in Facebook, I’ve all but stopped using Twitter and I’m extremely wary of any type of “sponsored content”. (The last applies to any kind of content provider, not just social media.)
I found one of my absolute favorite social media marketing developments on USA Network while watching Suits. (Great show — totally worth your time.) Throughout the broadcast, there’s a hashtag in the bottom left — “#suits”.
That’s clever, right? Just like at a conference when the MC announces what everyone should be tweeting under, but without the need for contextual awareness. My mother wouldn’t know what the hell a hashtag is, but it’s unobtrusive and it looks like a pretty normal marketing bumper.
The really, really clever part though? During the commercial break, they’ll prompt the viewers with question and repeat the hashtag — “Should character X have done Y to Z?” They’re telling us that we don’t have to wait to talk about the show. Do it right now — there’s a minute to kill while the commercials play out…
Brilliant! Tell viewers how to talk about the show and prompt them with a question that stimulates a passionate response. Bingo bango: a ton of buzz that will feed back into the viewer numbers and people are sitting on the cough through the commercials. USA isn’t just engaging their audience, they’re telling us how to engage each other.
I think there’s going to be a bad reaction when social media users get sick of having sharks in the pool with them, but the way it’s unfolding is really interesting to watch.
A few weeks ago I finished reading Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson, which was a great book that I’d highly recommend to anyone interested in the psychology of design. One of my favorite sections was in Chapter 8, “Limits on Attention, Shape, Thought and Action“, was about primary goals and cleanup steps.
In short, once we finish the main goal of a given task, we tend to shift our (limited) attention other tasks entirely, forgetting all about the loose ends we left behind. Some examples Johnson used:
He goes on with more good examples and what can or has been done to avoid these “end-of-task short-term memory lapses”, but my mind immediate went to an example of my own.
It’s insane that no matter how many times I’ve used them, I almost always forget a step somewhere when using my debit card to checkout from a store. It normally goes like this:
From here I typically get distracted by any number of things; chatting with my wife, monitoring prices as they scan, that annoying kid on register 7 — whatever. Meanwhile a monochromatic, passive-matrix screen is prompting me for more information:
No matter what the tiny green screen says, I’m not going to see it unless I’m looking directly at it, and that’s frustrating for everyone involved. The person behind the counter has wait for me to notice the lull in activity or politely point out that I’m not paying attention, and I have to feel like a moron for forgetting to babysit a machine. What’s more, you can recognize the especially frustrated employees because they don’t even wait for you to mess up, they’ll prompt you through the entire process in a droning “I’ve-said-this-1000-times-today” voice before you even open your wallet — “It’s going to ask you for X, you need to Y before you Z“.
I can’t really blame them — if I turn my head away from the machine, I’m likely to forget all about it and it’ll be up to the cashier to bring me back to task. Once I got a little huffy and said to the cashier, “The stupid thing should beep at me, or have a blinking red light or something. Doesn’t it drive you crazy?”
She just smiled at me politely, because it DOES drive her crazy but there’s nothing she can do about it.
I recently had to renew the domain name for this site. Like many, I just go through GoDaddy because, well… I don’t know why. I never gave it any thought before, but I doubt I’ll ever do it again. The following day I just mentioned the renewal to my friend Mark at the office — I didn’t even go into details before his ranting response inspired the title for this post:
“GoDaddy is a f*cking labyrinth — how many minotaurs did you have to kill?”
There were laughs, but really… what’s wrong here? Two experienced users, a software engineer and a web developer, both had such a hard time with GoDaddy that they sat around and whined about it?
GoDaddy is successful and resourceful. They’ve been doing business on the web since ’97 and have tons of e-commerce experience. So, how could they possibly botch the domain renewal experience so badly? It’s a pretty business-critical transaction, isn’t it? I took screenshots throughout the process because the experience just screamed “complain about this in public“.
I originally went through the renewal process and was ready to checkout before I realized I didn’t have my wallet with me, so I just left it for later. When I came back, the home page looked like this:
Obligatory disclaimer that I've added the red arrows
Notice that I’ve an item in the cart (top-right) and a domain expiration notice (left), but why am I still being prompted to log in (top)? If I’m not logged in, how you know this stuff about my account?
Finding my domain would have been easy enough through the Account button, but I just went straight to the cart from the top-right link and was rewarded with the real impetus for this post; the Upsell:
Several screens stitched together in Photoshop to show the whole gauntlet
These (nearly 3) screens really changed things for me. After a few seconds of earnestly reading product descriptions, I concluded that GoDaddy was trying to trick me into buying more. I went into defensive mode — they were a hostile and aggressive salesman trying to take advantage of me. Normally I experiment with interfaces, I click things to see what happens, but not this time. I cautiously scrolled to the bottom of the page only to meet a pair of confusing buttons, “No Thanks” and “Add & Continue”.
Wait a minute… I want to continue but I don’t want to add anything — if I click “Add & Continue” will something else be added to my purchase? If I say “No Thanks” am I backing out of the entire purchase or just the extra junk? At this point, all trust in the process has been shattered — I wanted to finish and get the heck out of there as soon as I could, which takes us to the payment screen:
It should go without saying that I added the red arrows and path, but I evidently said it anyway.
What a mess… I’m still being asked to log in even after I’ve completed that step, so I’m feeling a little more shaky about all this. And then there’s the form — everyone likes eyeball acrobatics, right? 
It really took effort to finish the form, mostly when I got to Step 4 with the terms and purchase summary. I don’t mean that it was hard, I’m saying it took a lot more thought than it should have. Payment forms aren’t new — I completely understand that good ones can be a challenge, but go copy someone else’s if you don’t feel up to solving this problem. I really wonder what the percentage of cart abandonment is — is it possible that users feel like they’ve invested too much to turn back now?
The confirmation screen had some room for improvement too, but I’d prefer to wrap my post up with the customer survey I completed (out of masochistic curiosity). I just want to point out the first and third questions:
I stitched together all the options for the third question.
So, they recognize that the surveyed could possibly be building/supporting a website, whether for others or for themselves, but they don’t have a single tech-related option under the industry question? I guess “Professional” is close, but that’s a pretty broad umbrella for web development…
Could they have meant “Which of the following best describes your website’s industry“? Either way, how useful could this survey data be if the questions are either misleading and/or its answers are incomplete?
This was a really painful user experience for me, but GoDaddy has to have a team of designers, right? Maybe a UI/UX professional or two? I know I didn’t really go into any depth on the problems, and I certainly haven’t proposed any solutions, but why hasn’t any one of the dozens/hundreds/thousands of people working with GoDaddy questioned their process?