In my last post Experiencing the product, or productizing the experience?, I talked about my experience with SiteZ and how their overall experience left much to be desired even though the core product was good enough. In this post, I will try to analyze things that went wrong which shouldn’t have.
Here are 5 things that went wrong for SiteZ if I look from a customer’s perspective:
- They misled the user about the time it takes to register.
- They didn’t allow the user to abort the registration attempt gracefully (which left the email address behind and created rest of the mess).
- They were not forthcoming about who is sending me these spam emails (the email address was hidden with a display name that was the advertiser’s).
- They exposed a feature to me (unsubscribe) which didn’t work
- They didn’t give me an easy way to delete my account – emails bounced, UI didn’t have a button to delete, etc. Continue reading
About 6 months back, I saw a print advertisement from a well-known job portal (I will call it SiteZ): “Free webinar and live chat with well-known Mr. X”. When I visited their site, they helpfully informed me that I need to be a registered user of their site (which meant I had to be someone looking for a job, which I was not), but it would take only 30 seconds to register. I didn’t mind giving 30 sec and a few bits of personal information to attend this webinar so I proceeded with registration. It took me about 2-3 minutes before I realized that this is going to take quite some time – they wanted all kinds of details about my profile, what kind of job I was looking for, what I had been doing so far in my career, etc.; simply uploading my resume didn’t SiteZ. So I abandoned my effort and tried to find a way of deleting this account I had just created. 