This should probably be a part one of five hundred, but I need to vent about these three.
I want to buy chipotles, not apply for a mortgage.
I wouldn’t be so annoyed at having to create a userid, except they enforce their DBA’s concept of what’s an appropriate login name and password. For example, my login choices of root and Administrator were already taken. smartass was available, but my password, do_you_want_to_sell_me_the_chipotles_or_not was rejected as being too long. What’s up with that?
The problems?
- I have to download an additional plugin. This interrupts my browsing session and spams my desktop with upsell icons from the plugin manufacturer.
- The poodles-dancing-on-the-ceiling animation usually lacks any useful information. It’s either written in Marketese or its content is focused on “corporate identity.” Nobody cares about your corporate identity except you.
- About 25% of the time, the designer was so awed by their creation, they forgot the “skip the corporate identity spiel” link.
And you know what? It’s usually a disappointing and fluffy item like a blinking clock. Okay, we have our own issues with the time continuum here as the minutes features of my watch, computer clock, and oven timer all disagree. But I wonder why people feel compelled to tell me what time their server thinks it is. Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? (“As I was walking down the street one day….”)
Any web site that will not sell to you without creating a profile suffers from the gravest of all design and information architecture mistakes: it puts the needs of the people who own the site before the needs of the people who will be using the site. Yes, great, I understand that you want me to create a profile and forget to opt-out of your sale mailings, but is frustrating me so much that I won’t ever come back, and will possibly abandon my intial purchase (and then bad mouth you in my blog [wink]), a risk you’re willing to take to get my data?
The best solution I’ve seen to this is the shopping cart that gives you the option of logging back into an existing account or checking out as a “guest,” and in the final step of the guest checkout procedure asking you if you want to save your information as a profile. Most of the time a shopper will say yes to that and you’ve achieved the marketing goal that the kludgy “you must create a profile to buy” approach shoots for and misses horribly.
It’s all been downhill since zombo.com.
Hopefully, you don’t get any of those java messages when attempting to get to my blog. :)
I’m annoyed by the create account prompts, especially when just trying to read news websites, usually local papers. It drives me insane, really.
BTW, you said “serendipitous”. LOL