Although I am currently earning my daily bread by selling real estate, I would say in answer to the question “what do I do” that I sell stuff off the Internet. Today this is property; tomorrow it could be completely different.
So, although I might come over as a complete twat in these postings, I actually do know a little bit about website design, even though I am not really very creative. I am just good at bossing creative people around – telling them what I like and what I don’t like or, more accurately, what is going to sell more product, or what isn’t.
There are many books on the subject of good website design (which most web designers seemingly haven’t read). They’re probably too lazy and too busy being ‘creative’. But here is a quick primer on what not to do if you want to avoid pissing off not only myself, but the vast majority of website users:
1. Make a really Flashy into sequence
If I want to watch groovy moving pictures, I will switch on the TV instead because it’s a lot groovier and faster instead. So you’re really clever with Flash? I don’t fucking care. I’m busy and I just want to get onto your site as quickly as possible and get out again. I’m clicking on the ‘Skip Intro’ link in nano-seconds. Don’t have a ‘Skip Intro’ link? Then fuck off – I’m going to your competitor’s site instead.
So why spend money just to annoy your clients?
2. Add music to your site
Whenever I’m sat in front of my PC, I’m playing MP3’s or listening to Internet Radio – never sat in silence. Why the hell do you think I want to listen to some crappy plinky-plonk piano midi at the same time? It annoys the crap out of me. I will choose exactly what I want to listen to while viewing your website, thank you very much.
3. Get really creative with the navigation
The title of Steve Krug’s excellent primer on website usability, Don’t Make Me Think, says it all. We don’t want to see your creativity when it comes to positioning all the links. We want them all to be where we think that they are likely to be. Make me hunt for them too much and the only thing I’ll be clicking on is the back button to get away from your crappy site.
And if you’re thinking of using those snazzy little pulldown menus with additional links coming off the side – the ones where, if your mouse isn’t exactly pixel perfect on the navigation the whole thing closes up on you, don’t do it – it’s really fucking annoying.
4. Fuck up your forms
So you’ve managed to avoid making any of the mistakes that I’ve mentioned above and – congratulations – you’ve got me wanting to do what you wanted me to do – buying something or registering to get more information, etc.
But don’t start patting yourself on the back too much as the greatest challenge is still ahead of you – making a form in such a format that I only need to make one attempt at filling it in. This is something that I probably only manage to do about 25% of the time. This is not because I am a complete dick – it’s because you are.
I know that most of you Americans have never set foot outside your fine country, and so can perhaps be excused for thinking that there is nothing else in the world apart from America, but actually there are over 20 times more of us non-Americans than there are you Americans. And a surprisingly large amount of us have money too, money that we would like to give some of to you in return for some of your wonderful goods and services.
But you don’t make it easy for us, believe me.
OK, so most American websites do have a nice pulldown menu for countries, which is very nice of you. But the thing is that a lot of them also have a nice pulldown menu for states. Unfortunately though, a lot of them don’t have an option for ‘Non-US’ so the only way that we can continue is to cheat and take one at random. Usually AL as this is the first choice.
And then we have a similar problem with Zip Codes. In some places we have them and in some places we don’t. But even if we do have them, they aren’t a five-digit number (not even in not terribly exotic Canada). So again we have to cheat.
If any of you website owners are finding out that you’re getting a surprisingly large amount of business from the Zip Code 99999 area in Alabama, it just means that your forms are fucked.
Next problem is with the phone numbers. What should we do with our weird international country codes? Should we put them as +44 or 0044 or 44 or 01144 (or whatever it is you Americans need to dial in order to get outside the US)? Just give me a clue rather than make me do it by trial and error and I will be very happy.
Then we get the anti-spam-robot protection code thing. I can see the need for them but, really, in many cases I reckon you’re just trying to take the piss. Is that squashed up symbol supposed to be a 1 or an i or an I, or could it be a 0 or an o or an O? I don’t frigging know because they all look the bleeding same, for God’s sake, especially when they have weird lines all over them to make it even harder to figure out what they are going to be.
I have seen some sites now with things like ‘type in the answer: is fire hot or cold?’ or ‘what number comes after 3?’ Very, very simple – so why can’t everyone do it this way?
Now comes the moment of truth when I hit Send. As I mentioned earlier, 75% of the time something will be wrong. OK, I’m not perfect, sometimes it’s my fault. If you’ve done a good job, then the form will tell me exactly what I have done wrong. But usually it just says ‘Error’ and so I have to try and figure out what it might be.
If you really want to piss me off, then lose all of the data that I input the first time so I have to start from scratch. If you just want to annoy me a bit, then make me input my password again and tick the box saying I agree to your terms and conditions and make me go through all of the hassle of getting past your anti-spam-robot thing again.
Finally, if you want me to scream obscenities at my monitor for the next half hour, the piece de resistance after I have gotten the whole way through the process is to finish off with a big message saying:
500: Internal Server Error
5. Don’t respond well to criticism
Sometimes, when I really like your company but hate your website, or if you have no direct competitors, I will write to you (politely – not in the foul-mouthed rant style that is the one I favour mostly while blogging) telling you ways that your website could be simply enhanced to make it a lot more user-friendly.
Often I get a message thanking me for pointing this out to them (especially if it’s a small one-man-band site), many more times I hear nothing at all. On other occasions, I get an angry message from the owner basically telling me to go and mind my own fucking business because no one else has ever mentioned anything.
No, they probably didn’t – they probably just clicked on their back buttons and went to your competitor instead.
6 Comments
October 17, 2008 at 9:39 pm
I think you know very well how a good site should be done. And I agree with all the points, however, I think you went a little over board with Americans and all that. I hope you understand what I mean. I guess you find people designing such sites all over the world.
October 18, 2008 at 2:14 am
I didn’t mean to seem anti-American in this posting – that wasn’t the idea at all. It’s just that, as America probably represents (I’m guessing here) 80% of all e-commerce revenues, it is easy for them to forget about the 20% non-American business.
Conversely, websites that are based outside the US tend to be more aware of the fact that non-US business can be significant and so design their sites accordingly.
October 23, 2008 at 6:48 pm
You have so eloquently voiced feelings I’ve had for quite a number of years. My pet hate is when you find those US-specific formats that don’t allow us folk from “other countries” to complete forms.
October 23, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Glad to hear that I’m not the only one who get irritated at the hoops these people make us non-Americans climb through to sign up.
Actually I forgot to mention one of my other pet peeves about websites in this piece and this is when I read something like “this website is best viewed at a screen resolution of 800×600 using Internet Explorer 5″.
So fucking what? Do you really expect me to change my screen resolution and browser just so your lame website won’t look quite so lame? Fuck off – if you were any good as a web designers you’d stop being so bloody lazy and make a site that works perfectly well no matter what you browser or screen resolution is.
Luckily these messages seem to be dying out now – so there is some progress being made out there.
October 26, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Nice post very funnily written. The method you use to dial another country depends on the country you’re in and not the one you’re dialling (other than the bit at the end). From my understanding its us Brits who are different than most other countries.
October 26, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Actually the extension for dialling international lines is one thing where us Brits are ‘normal’ (unlike our habit of driving on the wrong side of the road). It’s the Americans who are the odd ones out by having to dial 011 instead of the standard 00:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_call_prefixes
Looking through this list, I can see that the French have changed over the years. I remember being in a cheap hotel in Cannes during my film biz days in the late 80’s and screaming at the receptionist about what a useless, shitty hotel they had because I couldn’t get an international line no matter how hard I tried. I was quite embarrassed when I learned that, in those days, you had to dial something weird like 33 to get an international line while I was trying the standard 00.