How To Be Dumber

Posted by RP

February 21, 2008

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Yep, here I am again. Annoyed yet again by Internet business dumbness. Just got turned off … you might say "sent away without my supper" from yet another site where the geeks are more interested in showing off that they are in attracting customers and profits.

This particular site was an offering from a big name company .. can’t remember it now myself, exactly, they recently took their well-known brand and changed it, virtually overnight to some meaningless and confusing four-letter combination … trying to be cute. Zeai, izea, Aeza … I have no idea … it’s kind of like the old TV show disclaimer to me … the stories are true, the names have been changed to protect the innocent. (In this case I think it’s more like the names have been changed to protect the guilty, but we won’t go there).

One thing you have to think about when changing a well-known brand in order to show off the vastly overpriced four-letter domain name you just bought to be cute? Some people have short memories for meaningless phrase, and a great many people are mildly dyslexic … they continually ‘flip’ letters unconsciously in the mind, and never know it. The same people who have no trouble at all remembering an excellent brand like "PayPerSomething" may have lot of trouble with four-letter anagram jumbles … but hey, we only want smart people at our sites, don’t we … we’ll leave the retards for someone else.

"Retard" is exactly what I feel like and what I imagine I am hearing from the site developer when I run into the situation which prompted this post … it’s happened at least 6 times in the past three days or so. A site needs a URL typed in by me … for search or for some action that the site owner proposes to do with that URL to perform a service for me … and make money for himself. So, how do you get a site visitor to type in a URL? Seems pretty simple, doesn’t it? Just use the commands in your favorite language to place on the screen an in input box … "Type in the URL here:" Seems pretty simple to me. So, still having no idea what this service does for me, why the site operator wants me to type in a URL, but expecting there’s some benefit, I type. (by the way, the only thing missing from this screen shot is the site name and a copyright notice … there are no instructions, example formats, etc. Just a test to see how the customer’s mind works … a little game the developer is playing because s/he was bored designing the site and the owner/investor doesn’t care enough to try things out from a customer’s perspective. Or, perhaps, thinks of his/her customers as ‘retards’ as the designer obviously does.

Can you guess what happens next? yep, you guessed it. They wanted the URL with the http:// prepended. Note, they didn’t ask for it to begin with … which would have been simple enough … too customer oriented though, it wouldn’t have left him or her guessing. Or, they could have prepended it themselves … which would have been only slightly less complicated … and way more customer friendly … remember, at this stage they don’t "have" the customer locked in to any relationship yet, so it might pay to treat tem just a little bit as if they actually wanted the customer there in the first place.

No, what they really wanted to do is to show off their superiority and their "control" of the situation (self-esteem issues, Dr. Melfi?). So if you want to control your customers and let them know who is boss, right from the git-go, just design your client interface the way these clowns did. If you want participation (and maybe even money) from you customers instead … think this kind of stuff through from the standpoint of someone who doesn’t have a degree in computer science. That’s my million-dollar tip for the day. (oh, and by the way, when you construct an error message … they will be necessary somewhere along the line … think about your English … in the case shown it does not "appear" that I left off the "http://", I obviously did, because I didn’t think I needed it … the gratuitous (and redundant) "appears" just makes the customer more aware of his/her "place" in the scheme of your sites.

So if you’ve read this far you can dismiss this as a curmudgeon’s grumbling … or you can look at is as a wake up call and think about how you think of (and treat) your customers.

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