The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption

Here’s a compilation of silly and stupid ways companies are hindering adoption of their products and services. I must admit, some of the companies that I’ve invested in have made these mistakes—in fact, that’s why I know these mistakes are (a) silly; (b) stupid; and (c) hinder adoption.

1. Enforced immediate registration. Requiring a new user to register and provide a modicum of information is a reasonable request—I just think you should do it after you’ve sucked the person in. Most sites require that registration is the first step, and this puts a barrier in front of adoption. At the very least, companies could ask for name and email address but not require it until a later time.

   A good example of a site that does the right thing is Netvibes. It allows you to do a high level of customization without registering. (Thanks to Glenn Kelman)

2. The long URL. When you want to send people an URL the site generates an URL that’s seventy characters long—or more! When you copy, paste, and email this URL, a line break is added, so people cannot click on it to go to the intended location.

   Here’s an URL for a billiard table copied and pasted from the CostCo site. Just how many billiard-table models could CostCo be selling?

   http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11197553&search=billiard%20table&Sp=S&Mo=8&cm_re=1-_-Top_Left_Nav-_-Top_search&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&Ns=P_Price|1||P_SignDesc1&N=0&whse=BC&Dx=mode+matchallpartial&Ntk=All&Dr=P_CatalogName:BC&Ne=4000000&D=billiard%20table&Ntt=billiard%20table&No=0&Ntx=mode+matchallpartial&Nty=1&topnav=&s=1

   The justification often goes like this: “We create a long URL because people with Crays might break our code and see private pages. Seventy characters that can be twenty-six lower case letters, twenty-six upper case letters, or ten numbers ensures that no one can break our code since the possible combinations outnumber the quantity of atoms in the universe.” This is what keeps sites like TinyUrl and SnipURL in business.

   Also, speaking of URLs, it’s good to have an easy naming convention for URLs. MySpace, for example, creates easy-to-remember URLs like http://www.myspace.com/guykawasaki.

---

Test: Can people communicate your site’s URLs to others over the phone?

Extra credit: People using Verizon and can do this despite its coverage.

---

3. Windows that don’t generate URLs. Have you ever wanted to point people to a page, but the page has no URL? You’ve got a window open that you want to tell someone about, but you’d have to write an essay to explain how to get that window open again. Did someone at the company decide that it didn’t want referrals, links, and additional traffic? This is the best argument I can think of for not using frames.

4. The unsearchable web site. Some sites that don’t allow people to search. This is okay for simple sites where a site map suffices, but that’s seldom the case. If your site has a site map that goes deeper than one level, it probably needs a search box.

5. Sites without Digg, del.icio.us, and Fark bookmarks. There’s no logic that I can think of why a company would not want its fans to bookmark its pages. And yet many companies don’t make this possible. When my blog hits the front page of Digg, page views typically increase by a factor of six or seven times. It’s true that the Digg effect wears off quickly, but some new readers stick around and that’s a good thing.

6. Limiting contact to email. Don’t get me wrong: I love email. I live and die by email, but there are times I want to call the company. Or maybe even snail mail something to it. I’ve found many companies only allow you to send an email via a web form in the “Contact Us” page. Why don’t companies call this page “Don’t Contact Us” and at least be honest?

7. Lack of feeds and email lists. When people are interested in your company, they will want to receive information about your products and services. This should be as easy as possible—meaning that you provide both email and RSS feeds for content and PR newsletters.

8. Requirement to re-type email addresses. How about the patent-pending, curve-jumping, VC-funded Web 2.0 company that wants to you to share content but requires you to re-type the email addresses of your friends?

   I have 7,703 email addresses in Entourage. I am not going to re-type them into the piece-of-shiitake, done-as-an-afterthought address book that companies build into their products. If nothing else, companies can use this cool tool from Plaxo or allow text imports into the aforementioned crappy address book. When do you suppose a standard format will emerge for transferring contacts?

9. User names cannot contain the “@” character. In other words, a user name cannot be your email address. I am a member of hundreds of sites. I can’t remember if my user name is kawasaki, gkawasaki, guykawasaki, or kawasaki3487. I do know what my email address is, so just let me use that as my user name.

10. Case sensitive user names and passwords. I know: user names and passwords that are case sensitive are more secure, but I’m more likely to type in my user name and password incorrectly. One of the funniest moments of a demo is when a company’s CEO can’t sign into her own account because she didn’t put in the proper case of her user name or password. I’ve seen it happen.

11. Friction-full commenting. “Moderated comments” is an oxymoron. If your company is trying to be a hip, myth-busting, hypocrisy-outing joint, then it should let anyone comment. Here’s an example of one such policy:

    Q. Who can leave comments on GullyHag

    A. Anyone who has been invited, either by us or by a friend. The invite system works like Gmail. We’ve invited a bunch of our favorite execs, bloggers, and friends to comment, then given them invitations to share with their friends and colleagues. That way, the burden of inclusion, and exclusion, is shared.

    The concept that people have to be invited to post comments is pathetic—if you hold yourself out as a big cojones company, then act like it. Even the concept that one has to register to post a comment is lousy. There have been many times that I started to leave a comment on a blog but stopped when I realized that I’d have to register.



12. Unreadable confirmation codes. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t support spam or robots creating accounts. A visual confirmation graphic system is a good thing, but many are too difficult to read. For example, this is what I got when trying to create a Yahoo! account. Is that an uppercase “X”? Is the last character an “s,” “5,” or “S”? Maybe this only affects old people like me, but it seems that all one merely has to prove is that you’re not a robot so a little bit of fuzziness should be good enough. For example, if the code is “ghj1lK” and someone who enters “ghj11K” is close enough.

13. Emails without signatures. There have been many times that I wanted to immediately call the sender or send him something, but there’s no signature. Also, when I book an appointment with a person, I like to put in his contact information in case I need to change it. Communication would be so much easier if everyone put a complete signature in their email that contains their name, company, address, phone, and email address.

    On a corporate level, communication would be so much easier if companies stop sending emails with a warning not to respond because the sender’s address is not monitored. I don’t mean they should not include the warning. I mean they should monitor the address.

14. Supporting only Windows Internet Explorer. Actually, I’m not nearly as vehement about this as you might think. Supporting Macintosh, Safari, and other Windows browsers is a lot of work, so this is your call. If you define your market as only the people who use Windows Internet Explorer, so be it. You may have to really invest some effort into this one, but all the other items in this list are stupidly simple.

---

Comments

[Paul]

Can you please explain point 14 a little more.

[GSM Abonnement Aanbieding]

Hi I have seen your site which that a good & impressive site, Zoekt u de goedkoopste GSM abonnementen in combinatie met een mobiele telefoon?! Hier vindt u een overzicht van de meest populaire GSM abonnement aanbiedingen van dit moment. GSM Abonnement Aanbieding

[Michael]

Thanks for the nice article! as a webmaster, I HATE the idea of forcing my visitors to do stupid things that other sites do! However, the CAPTCHA code you provide above is VERY VISIBLE for a human eye but prevents NUTS of spam...

Regards
Michael
Free PS3

[Zaid Rasid]

This is one of my favorite posts. Where I work, during the process of releasing a consumer website we used a lot of your above points and ensured we weren't making the same mistakes. For example we only asked for a user to provide their email and a password to register with us. Also, the seniors leaders thought it wise that users create a username but after constant nagging by myself and by showing them this post, the final product used an email address as the login.

[watadoo]

On top of that, I have to specify the author, the ISBN/UPC (the what?), the publication date----

well, you were on a library site. Anyone in publishing or the library science knows what an ISBN/UPC is. ;-)

[watadoo]

We had a long argument (discussion) last night about item #1. Some say immediate login or account creation is the wave of the future while others of us believe what you think. I see valid points on both sides but am interested to see what others think about the direction of privacy and forced sign-up on a going-forward basis.-----

Had the same argument/discussion at my gig last night, too. The key for some media/content driven sites is to clearly show what the site has to offer beyond a one paragraph fuzzy mission statement. More sites need to invest some resources in clear writing and fleshing out what it is the site has to offer and what delineates it from the pack before asking for a reg. I run in terror from the mob of social networking sites who want my stats before I really know the what/how/why of their system. I don't expect them to give away the store -- just to give me a lot more than some corporate bs clipart of happy, dialed in people smartly dressed people and a vague half paragraph of generic marketing slop.

I liked most all of the rest of the list. Especially #6. Far too many sites of all types are in violation of that rule.

Bill T.

[Eric Tam]

A wonderful anti example in how NOT to design user interface is this particular library website.
http://www.myhamilton.ca/myhamilton/LibraryServices/LibraryCatalogue/SuggestionForPurchase.htm

To recommend a book for the library to order, I have to fill in multiple fields to prove I am a library patron.

FIRST OF ALL:
Why am I making book recommendations if I am not a library patron! How many non library patrons would surf that page?

On top of that, I have to specify the author, the ISBN/UPC (the what?), the publication date, as well as the intended audience and format.
I feel like I am on a game show. Last time I checked: I am not the librarian!

[johno]

Those illegible captcha's are the worst. On a weekly basis I run away from sites after being told that I'm not entering the correct text. Small font sizes are also a nuisance, especially as I work on a small screen. But my number one pet hate is having to sign-up before I can post a comment; I never do.
Oh, and one more thing: I hate to see ads placed above a post; I arrive at the page, and what do I see? Google ad's; and it's not until I've scrolled down 400px that I see the post.

[jan]

Great list...here's two more.

As someone with a hyphenated name (and there are many of us out there) , how about websites not allowing e-mail addies, oh, and names with hyphens?

Or how about having no e-mail addie, just the contact page template? Great, so how (as a backup freak) am I supposed to keep a log of my issues?

[Sanyog]

Guy,
Jajah needs to pay attention to point 12!

Cheers

[Tim Beadle]

I would add to the list "otherwise-excellent sites which time your session out, even though you're not engaging in any secure activity, like banking".

Case in point: Property Finder.

[Travis]

#14 I disagree with. You should at least support Firefox and IE. Those 2, minimum.

[Andrew S]

Sites that do not allow '+' in the e-mail address. It's perfectly valid according to the RFCs and it allows me to filter things on my end.

This is unfortunately largely a lost cause on the web. From my experience, even giants on the web like eBay and Dell do not work properly with addresses containing a plus character. Some of their pages work, some don't--it just demonstrates how hard it is within a large organization to maintain the proper standards and use the same libraries for handling user information and input.

Switch to a service like Yahoo mail which uses the "-" separator instead of "+" and you'll make your life easier. Or better yet, just avoid those sites which are poorly programmed.

[Michael Kovacs]

So I finally went to checkout netvibes after seeing a huge amount of subscribers on my blog use it and your posting talking about how NetVibes does the signup thing right. I agree with their initial experience being the right thing. They suck me in before requiring any of my information, but here's where they falter and it's enough to make me want to cancel my account:

They emailed me my password in clear text! So if anyone from Netvibes is reading please turn off this "feature". I know what my password is, I just signed up to your service. I imagine that you'd email it to me again if I run through your "forgot password" process.

[Spencer W]

You've commented here on a lot of things that bother me - and that I would change if I were in charge of a site. One other thing that bothers me about web sites is when the engineers forget to add www compatibility... for example if you go to http://guykawawsaki.com it loads fine. if you simply type guykawasaki.com in the address bar (as most people do), it works fine. But on some sites this is not the case, resulting in some kind of a 400 error, simply because their server isn't configured to resolve it to www.whatever.com! They should figure out that this minor inconvenience speaks to their own skills as web designers and administrators.

[Shefaly Yogendra]

And it took me 3 attempts to read the anti-spam goobledegook posing as a threat to spammers...

[Shefaly Yogendra]

Hmm.. Good points. But remind me, why I cannot send just this post to a friend while I am at it, without using Digg or opening my email application on the side (often difficult if using somebody else's machine, don't you agree?)

[Alex Har]

Best 10 points I have seen on digital marketing which probably much more trendier in USA that Asia. It just about starting. Will certainly review your article on my blog.

[Devdas Bhagat]

Enforced immediate registration. Requiring a new user to register and provide a modicum of information is a reasonable request—I just think you should do it after you’ve sucked the person in.

Places selling content like adult sites would find it better to require registration (and billing) ASAP.

On the other hand, places like Amazon don't need registration until you actually buy.

Most sites require that registration is the first step, and this puts a barrier in front of adoption. At the very least, companies could ask for name and email address but not require it until a later time.

They need to show me the value of their content before they get my personal information. See Slashdot or Kuro5hin for something fairly customisable and with enough valuable content that it makes sense to sign up.

Keep in mind that corporates tend to get distrusted more than individuals (too many corporations sell personal data to spammers, either because the people there think they are anonymous or because they aren't personally responsible).

The long URL. When you want to send people an URL the site generates an URL that’s seventy characters long—or more! When you copy, paste, and email this URL, a line break is added, so people cannot click on it to go to the intended location.

Very few email clients I deal with are broken that way. The line may wrap, but it doesn't break (Modern MUAs understand line continuations). HTML is a bad thing in email, and that's far too popular.

Also see http://tinyurl.com/

*SNIP*

Also, speaking of URLs, it’s good to have an easy naming convention for URLs. MySpace, for example, creates easy-to-remember URLs like http://www.myspace.com/guykawasaki.

Not necessarily. I don't think I have visited too many sites by direct URL in years, except for those already in my browser address bar.

Test: Can people communicate your site’s URLs to others over the phone?

Just google for the string, and see the results from this website. Much easier to tell people over the phone.

Windows that don’t generate URLs. Have you ever wanted to point people to a page, but the page has no URL? You’ve got a window open that you want to tell someone about, but you’d have to write an essay to explain how to get that window open again. Did someone at the company decide that it didn’t want referrals, links, and additional traffic? This is the best argument I can think of for not using frames.

Oh dear. There are all the database driven sites, the sites which "need" Javascript, the sites which need ad-views per page, so a small article must be viewed over four pages by direct link, and the printable version cannot be directly linked to. Frames are fairly irrelevant nowadays (Open in new tab is your friend).

The unsearchable web site. Some sites that don’t allow people to search. This is okay for simple sites where a site map suffices, but that’s seldom the case. If your site has a site map that goes deeper than one level, it probably needs a search box.

Or it needs to grant Google access.

Sites without Digg, del.icio.us, and Fark bookmarks. There’s no logic that I can think of why a company would not want its fans to bookmark its pages.

Possibly because they don't want the crowd from those websites? I'm not sure Cisco or Amazon _need_ bookmarking, and nor do most small business websites.

Limiting contact to email. Don’t get me wrong: I love email. I live and die by email, but there are times I want to call the company. Or maybe even snail mail something to it. I’ve found many companies only allow you to send an email via a web form in the “Contact Us” page. Why don’t companies call this page “Don’t Contact Us” and at least be honest?

a) No phones because of marketers.
b) No direct email because of spammers.

Contact forms work well in such cases.

Lack of feeds and email lists. When people are interested in your company, they will want to receive information about your products and services. This should be as easy as possible—meaning that you provide both email and RSS feeds for content and PR newsletters.

I don't particularly care about email feeds and RSS. What I want is content easily found by Google, and a reasonably easy way to buy stuff from that company. Yes, that implies service outside the US.

Requirement to re-type email addresses. How about the patent-pending, curve-jumping, VC-funded Web 2.0 company that wants to you to share content but requires you to re-type the email addresses of your friends?

And how about understanding that quite a few of us don't like getting such content in email, and our addresses are far too widespread for us to have control over which idiot puts our address in there?

I have 7,703 email addresses in Entourage.
I don't have an addressbook. If your email address is important enough, I'll remember it, or I can grep it from my MUA.

I am not going to re-type them into the piece-of-shiitake, done-as-an-afterthought address book that companies build into their products. If nothing else, companies can use this cool tool from Plaxo or allow text imports into the aforementioned crappy address book. When do you suppose a standard format will emerge for transferring contacts?

Mmmmm, Plaxo? That's a spammy site out there.
The standard format is vcard.

User names cannot contain the “@” character.

Useful for sites which basically tie you in by your email address (Google/Orkut, or the plethora of Yahoo!s services). Can work for some sites, not for others.

Case sensitive user names and passwords. I know: user names and passwords that are case sensitive are more secure, but I’m more likely to type in my user name and password incorrectly.

Sorry, but the first rule of security is to say 'NO'. Fail closed, deny access unless authorised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength

The strength of your password is proportional to the search space. For a alphanumeric password, the case insensitive search space is 36 characters, the case sensitive one is 62.

Unlike what some others have posted, the strength of the password does not double per character. The average number of guesses to break the password would be ((search space)**(length of password))/2 {where ** is exponentiation).

One of the funniest moments of a demo is when a company’s CEO can’t sign into her own account because she didn’t put in the proper case of her user name or password. I’ve seen it happen.

It happens to everyone. Typing everything in lowercase helps.

Friction-full commenting. “Moderated comments” is an oxymoron. If your company is trying to be a hip, myth-busting, hypocrisy-outing joint, then it should let anyone comment.

That leads to blog spam. Slashdot has one of the best moderation systems out there (user driven moderation, with peer review of the moderation, and you can still see all the comments if you wanted to).

Here’s an example of one such policy:

Q. Who can leave comments on GullyHag

A. Anyone who has been invited, either by us or by a friend. The invite system works like Gmail. We’ve invited a bunch of our favorite execs, bloggers, and friends to comment, then given them invitations to share with their friends and colleagues. That way, the burden of inclusion, and exclusion, is shared.

Have you considered that this might also result in reducing blog spam?

The concept that people have to be invited to post comments is pathetic—if you hold yourself out as a big cojones company, then act like it. Even the concept that one has to register to post a comment is lousy. There have been many times that I started to leave a comment on a blog but stopped when I realized that I’d have to register.

I agree with this. If I need to register to comment, I am not going to contribute. And like it or not, the value of the Internet is in the content created by the users. (Also see Reed's law).

Unreadable confirmation codes. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t support spam or robots creating accounts. A visual confirmation graphic system is a good thing, but many are too difficult to read.

If it;s easy to read, it can be OCRed. Have you considered that we have gotten fairly good OCRing software because of the wave of GIF spam selling stocks?

For example, this is what I got when trying to create a Yahoo! account. Is that an uppercase “X”? Is the last character an “s,” “5,” or “S”? Maybe this only affects old people like me, but it seems that all one merely has to prove is that you’re not a robot so a little bit of fuzziness should be good enough. For example, if the code is “ghj1lK” and someone who enters “ghj11K” is close enough.

I would normally not recommend any characters in a captcha be lowercase. All uppercase characters, case insensitive input is a good thing (and common).

As for the people who are saying that you need not have a captcha, but instead have a simple question of the "Which fruit is this?" might have to deal with languages other than English at some point.

Emails without signatures. There have been many times that I wanted to immediately call the sender or send him something, but there’s no signature. Also, when I book an appointment with a person, I like to put in his contact information in case I need to change it. Communication would be so much easier if everyone put a complete signature in their email that contains their name, company, address, phone, and email address.

Urrr, some of us explicitly don't want that information floating around. Also, the netiquette rules say that any sig over four lines is far too long (that's 320 characters, BTW).

On a corporate level, communication would be so much easier if companies stop sending emails with a warning not to respond because the sender’s address is not monitored. I don’t mean they should not include the warning. I mean they should monitor the address.

Hmmm, I thought a lot of that was because those addresses would otherwise need to feed into their support/marketing/CRM app queues and spam would make life a nightmare.

Supporting only Windows Internet Explorer. Actually, I’m not nearly as vehement about this as you might think. Supporting Macintosh, Safari, and other Windows browsers is a lot of work,

No, actually it's easiest to support everything but IE. Also, some of us do use non Mac/non Windows systems. Supporting everything is a lot easier than you think.

[Bernd Nurnberger]

I read the comments on digg.com (not as long and edified as these here) and was floored by the last one down the screen:

Add a Comment
Join digg for free to comment on this story. Have an account already? Login to comment.

Friction-full commenting, Guy said so in # 11. Now that I comment here for the first time, I will soon know if I hit another #11. For a first impression we get one chance.

[Tim Holt]

OK how about "Make cool blog posts you can print out and share with others or read and mark up in the coffee shop!" Having a "Printer Friendly" link for good readable content is a win!

[James Shaw]

Re: 13, checkout www.shortersigs.com. All the info you want in a signature, in just one URL.

James
http://shortersigs.com/5037NZNWDTDW

[Morgan Ramsay]

Other than this, the endlessly long webpages that should really split into an 'archive' (or page 2) ...

For example, this blog. Articles here are crying out in desperation for "Read more..." links. I have to scroll way down just to find the article to which I submitted comments that I want to track.

The "Recent Posts" sidebar makes for a nice navigation menu, but unfortunately, I still have to scroll down to find the menu.

[Paul]

Excellent post - the login-only-comments and impossible to read 'confirmation codes' are my biggest gripe with pages. I would, however, add a few more indepth ones:

1) Websites that don't allow 'tempinbox.com' as your email address provider but want you to sign up just to see what their site does (an expansion on your sign-up too early comment)

2) Webpages that are much wider than your browser window. Now I know I run my browser in 800x600 and the standard is seemingly now 1024x768 (?), but it is still frustrating as anything - scrolling down is fine, scrolling across is awkward.

Other than this, the endlessly long webpages that should really split into an 'archive' (or page 2), and the ridiculously slow speed that digg runs in Safari when i'm signed in - yet Flickr/Wikipedia etc. all run much faster.

[Chris Rodriguez]

Guy - Great post. Very relevant for me at this time. We had a long argument (discussion) last night about item #1. Some say immediate login or account creation is the wave of the future while others of us believe what you think. I see valid points on both sides but am interested to see what others think about the direction of privacy and forced sign-up on a going-forward basis.

Chris

[Brad Fults]

"Yes" on the unreadable CAPTCHAs. Those are annoying.

"No" on the links to del.icio.us, Fark, Digg. These belong at the browser level or through manual user interaction. Placing these on your site (assuming your site isn't hype news oriented) is pitiful and degrading to your brand.

"No" on developing a site for browsers other than IE being "a lot of work". That's bullshit. If you develop to web standards it's precisely the opposite situation. It will work in all browsers *except* IE in many cases, with no added effort for making it work in Safari, Firefox, Opera, etc.

[JF]

Funny, This morning I tried to have some information about TOGAF on the Open Group website.

I enjoyed a lot of "Hinder" : the barrier on entry is very high just for getting a decent definition of TOGAF.

After that experience, you start to Google for pdf or ppt or you go to Wikipedia instead of going to their site.

After that they complain they don't have enough certified architects (cfr ZapThink)...

I think I have been experiencing most of these barriers since 1997, on a lot of websites.

[blip]

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_top_ten_stu.html
http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=1119755

did u notice?

*************

Nothing much I can do about this. It's TypePad's methodology.

Guy

[STUDIO7DESIGNS]

Fantastic writing skills you have, I seemed to read through your article in a minute, even though it was huge... You got yourself a new subscriber for sure :)

I also like the title of your blog.

Cheers
Aran

[Morgan Ramsay]

Robert Winder wrote: Marketing is critical to a business, but not when the consumer has a problem and needs to talk with someone to get their problem resolved.

That's a marketing department problem, not a marketing problem. This problem is not present in all organizations. The marketing team is usually, and should be, the consumers' advocate. When this is not the case, someone in charge of strategy probably screwed up.

In some organizations, this problem manifests itself in the form of a department for each marketing activity. This structure often hinders communication and offsets strategic alignment... unless there is a strong interdepartmental alliance supporting collaboration. Rare.

By the way, my last name is spelled -ay. "Ramsey" is a derivative prevalent in England. My heritage is predominantly Scottish.

[Gabriel Gayhart]

Hey good post. I guess the only one i would take issue with is the #1, the log in. Although i agree in general with your point, but in some industries like real estate - asking for name and email before they access mls tools is wise. The perception is they are getting realtor access to a tool which motivated them to the website in the 1st place. EIther you offer them and they surf and leave for free (then whats the point of having a site) or you ask basic info up front and rely on those email followup skills. Just the 2 cents .. but hey thanks for the site- youve done an amazing job!

[Danis]

Guy, let me comment these items one by one:

1. Enforced immediate registration.
Some social networking services "accept" you only if you are registered. Privacy is the key! Facebook is a good example.

2. The long URL. The URL you provided is a search URL. As an engineer I can tell you that we put a lot of stuff the to be able to do whatever we need to do. Sometimes we want to protect the resource from being viewed by users other than you (that's right) because you have a permission to see the resource and other people don't. LinkedIn is a good example. What service should provide (or must) is a permalink wherever it's possible.

3. Windows that don’t generate URLs.
These are usually popups or frames. There are cases then you need them. What service should provide is a link to such popup if it's allowable/possible.

4. The unsearchable web site
Search can be so terrible that you don't want to see it. Good search cost money. On the other side if you see a good search result it means that site/service owners understand how to organize their information.

5. Sites without Digg, del.icio.us, and Fark bookmarks
And tomorrow we'll have yarks, shoopg and bonko. Should I drop old ones and add new ones? And by the way have you heard about the "huge traffic" fear? Yes, traffic can kill the service. BTW, you can add this to your new book. Traffic growth as one of the assumptions.

6. Limiting contact to email
I can understand the reason of "Contact Us" page existence. It helps to track the request and redirect it to the right person. What I don't understand is why they don't provide the simple emailto option as well. And yes, at some point company should start to display a phone number on the contacts page.

7. Lack of feeds and email lists
Some people just don't have good PR news or at least blog. Or they just afraid to be that open.

8. Requirement to re-type email addresses
If you are talking about contact lists there is one explanation I can think of. There are services which don't want all of your 7,703 contacts in their address book database.

9. User names cannot contain the “@” character
It's very simple. Some services don't want to take responsibilities exposing your email. That's why they need user name. There are tons of other reasons.

10. Case sensitive user names and passwords
This one is really stupid. Can't agree with you more.

11. Friction-full commenting
For many people it's just not a big deal. It's a matter of how many people (%) will sign up, If more than 50% of viewers are ready to sign up to be able to comment it's definitely worth it.

12. Unreadable confirmation codes
And I'd like them to think about color-blinded people too.

13. Emails without signatures
You cannot change the world Guy. People are lazy. And there are other reasons too.

BTW, this blog doesn't allow me to enter an email which is visible only for blog owner ;).

[Rahul]

Great post Guy! Some additional pet peeves of mine:

1) All marketing follow-up check boxes checked by default. The default should *always* be opt-in not opt-out. When I see the boxes checked by default, it just makes me distrust the company.

2) Overly fussy password requirements: if I can't use my standard password, I usually don't complete the registration - it's too much to remember.

3) Confirmation email with password in cleartext. It has happened and it drives me crazy.

[Robert Winder]

Morgan Ramsey wrote: In your opinion, marketing is noncritical? I'm deeply worried for any business in which you participate.

Marketing is critical to a business, but not when the consumer has a problem and needs to talk with someone to get their problem resolved.

[LeBain]

Right on. But I tried to click a link to bookmark this on del.ioci.us because #5 is a great idea, but couldn't find the del.icio.us icon or link on the page.

Another pet peeve are comment boards that require name and e-mail address. If you have a well-policed comment system, anonymous comments are as valuable as registered comments.

[Rob O'Hara]

One simple one I didn't see mentioned is load times. Just because I've got a broadband connection doesn't mean you need to completely fill it with some multimedia crapola. If your page takes more than a few seconds to load, I (and a suspect many others) will move on quickly.

[Will]

My favorite CAPTCHA is on TicketMaster.com. You are trying to buy tickets - you need to create an account, each page provides you with a certain amount of time to complete the page or you lose the tickets. At the same time, they use the most insane, multicolored, blurred, CAPTCHA I have ever seen on a site. By attempt three you have timed out and lost your tickets. Nothing more enjoyable than that when trying to buy tickets to an event with massive demand. By the time you get another pair of tickets, if you are lucky enough to get them, you have much worse seats. That newly created ticketmaster.com account sure does make you feel happy about it though - what a great trade off...who wanted the good seats...I now have a ticketmaster.com login id and password!

I think it may be a practical joke set up by the programmers at TicketMaster.com..."Hey guys...check out how pissed this is gonna make people...but who cares, they can't go anywhere else to get the tickets...this will be hilarious!"

[JordanL]

Did anyone else get amusement out of the fact that the post is titled top ten, and there are fourteen points listed?

[Kras Gadjokov]

* on FireFox and ActiveX: stop whining, guys - IE is there to stay. Until FireFox takes more than 25% of the market, few will be considering tuning their sites for FF as well. This is just business logic - why put 80% more efforts to please just 20% more clients, if you have limited resources?

* on Captcha: it is very easy to defeat any OCR - put a picture as Captcha and ask the visitor to type in the name of what is shown on the picture. Of course, this will require "localization" of the picture-word correspondence

[David Bain]

I had to laugh at your number 12 - Unreadable confirmation codes. Thank goodness I'm not the only one who never get them right the first time!

[Tim Walker]

Good post, Guy. Here are two more small peeves of this type that I didn't see mentioned yet:

1. When your phone number must be entered in a certain format. I would typically write my phone number like this -- 555.555.1212 -- but sometimes a form won't allow the periods. If this must happen, it's best when the exception comes back to you and there's the "proper" format, highlighted in bold red text, e.g. 555-555-1212. Worst is when you have to keep guessing what the format is. I've had to fill out forms where the phone # was required to proceed, and where the "proper" format was (555) 555-1212. *clenched teeth*

2. Another peeve is when a company I've already done business with has assigned me a customer ID . . . but then they don't allow me to just enter the ID to spare myself the burden of re-filling a form. This happened to me just today with a magazine subscription. I specifically save renewal notices and the like so I can skip steps when it comes time to renew -- but today I was foiled. The online form was frustrating enough that I ended up calling the toll-free # rather than filling it all out. Luckily for the company in question, it's in the small minority of merchants I would bother to do that for. Most of the time, if you make it too hard for me, I'll just figure I have better things to do.

[Dan]

"When do you suppose a standard format will emerge for transferring contacts?"

Actually there is one. It's called "vCard" and is supported cross-platform.

[Marie Germain]

Hello Guy--again! I think your are just the "bees knees". But...the point about friction! Huh? I had to sign-up at Typekey to get in to your last blog last month. How many passwords can one handle? And this blog too states that I have to sign-up at Windows Live ID. Huh? Your point number 11, "Friction Full Commenting" is not authentic today. The rest of your points, it's all good. Thanks for the post.

**********

Marie,

I don't think you have to sing up with Typekey to leave a comment here. It says "If" you have an account, you can use it.

Also, the Microsoft thing is a screen shot to show an example of friction-full commenting. It's not for commenting on my blog.

Thanks,

Guy

[Jenny Averman]

Good assortment, don't forget spyware sites. Or sites that plaster adult ads on what would otherwise be a site intended for everyone.

Sites that lack creativity in design or feature. So many sites just copy the standard idea, and don't innovate. They see no need to innovate because they are making money without doing so, but this will cost them visitors and money in the long run.

[David E Alexander]

Fantastic common sense articulation of the challenges faced when making the user experience exceptional. I would like to add
1. the notion of breadcrumb trails as a really useful way to help people get back to where they came from.

2. The ability to provide feedback on any apsect of the experience but set in the context of the moment the user felt the delight or pain. nothing accelerates improvement of bad websites and reinforcement of good design than feedback that is timely and easy to interpret in context of where the user was at the time they felt the way they did.

Love NetVibes it is similar if somewhat improved experience from the customised google homepage

Keep on blogging

[Asbjørn Ulsberg]

Actually, supporting other browsers than Internet Explorer is not a lot of work. Supporting Internet Explorer is surprisingly what's difficult if you develop your web pages in a standard-adherent way. Your web pages will work out of the box in up-to-date browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari if you just stick to the standards, plus the standards are well-explained and well-implemented and not something you have to hack and test and hack some more to get to work everywhere. Code once, deploy once.

Well, almost. Since Internet Explorer is so lousy at supporting standards, you may have to apply some hacks to get everything to work in that browser. But it's still a lot less work than coding for Internet Explorer first and then trying to hack everything back to how it should have been in the first place for all other browsers on the face of the planet.

Other than that, this is an excellent post and I agree with all of your assertions! :-)

[George]

How about companies that disallow valid email addresses?

For example, Air Canada will not send e-Tickets to customers who have two letter names in their email accounts. (xx@mycompany.com).

[Akhil Shahani]

Great post!

If I had to add a couple of points they would be:

1) Avoid using PDF files for online reading. Coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks a reader’s flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window.

2) Emphasise immediately what your site offers & how it is different from competing sites. Websites are incredibly bad at explicitly stating what they offer users. Instead, they hide their offerings in generic marketese that makes very little impression on prospective customers. When users have needs, they typically query search engines and allocate only a few seconds to scan each of the sites that the search engine drags up.

[Jojo]

Great post!

12. Yeah, those CAPTCHA codes are sometimes difficult to read. It's not only the characters but also the backgrounds. Sometimes the characters blend in too much with the background. Sometimes I'll have to kick off a magnifier app to read the damm codes. But what is even worse is when you type the wrong code, the page refreshes and what you wrote is cleared. Sheese! I've learned to copy what I wrote into my clipboard extender program before I click on anything that might clear the page.

14. I use FF browser. But as you note, some sites just don't want to support FF. MSNBC for instance. They require Active-X controls to work fully. I assume they refuse to support FF because they are part of MS$. Then there is myway.com. I used to use them as my home page as an alternative to Yahoo. But myway.com won't work w/o Active-X controls either. When I try to sign-in inside FF, I get:

The browser you're using is not allowing you to sign in to My Way.

Right now, your browser's settings are configured to disable cookies and/or javascript. In order to access your account, you must change your browser's settings to accept both cookies AND javascript.

Of course, both cookies and javascript ARE enabled. Communication with what passes for support over there was fruitless. So they lost a customer.

6. How about NO contact information at all? This becomes an acute problem when you are trying to register for a forum and for some unknown reason, the registration won't take. Like what I experienced at http://forum.zonelabs.org/zonelabs/ when I tried to register. I couldn't figure out how to register, so I couldn't post in the forum asking what the problem was. The Zonealarm reps all claimed they don't run the forum. The forum is hosted by Lithium. So I contacted Lithium and indirectly got the address of the person at Zonealarm responsible for the forums. He didn't know what the problem was but eventually it turned out that you weren't allowed to use digits in your username. Huh? Who've thunk? Last I checked, there still wasn't any email addr contact info posted on this forum. Doesn't matter to me though, I got rid of Zonealarm due to poor support.

Another example is Brother printers. There doesn't seem to be any way to contact them EXCEPT through email.

2. Here's one of those wonderful long URL's with all kinds of weird characters. I'm supposed to forward this to somebody?
http://www.pcworld.com/product/pricefinder/browse/category.html?id=11074&page=1&CMP=KNC-SEM&HBX_PK=pcw_01-CAM-SHOP-GEN&HBX_OU=50&tk=pcw_01-CAM-SHOP-GEN&gclid=COWOybfgh4oCFRznYAodgRuKeQ
.

And I'll add one more:
I block javascript by default using NoScript in FF until/if I choose to look deeper into the site or enter into a relationship with them. Which means that I have to choose to enable javascripting for the site. But then there are sites like http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_top_ten_stu.html where the list of javascript providers is literally longer than the height of my monitor (and I am running 1600x1200 on a 20" monitor). That's criminal!

[Peter G.]

That CostCo URL really needs only the first part, and even that could be easily reduced if they cared:

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11197553

Online catalogs should provide a short "Permalink" right there on the item page that can be shared around without this kind of URL hacking.

. png

[Pamela Slim]

Oh, what music to my ears! I, too, get extremely annoyed by many of these seemingly small but highly annoying things. A couple more of my pet peeves that I nitpicked about myself awhile ago http://tinyurl.com/2z6tj6 :

-No photo on the front of the blog or on the "about" page. I can understand if you are a disgruntled employee saying bitter things about your employer and have to disguise your identity, but if you have a business blog, put up your picture! It really helps to develop a feel for the leadership and employees of the company.

-I realize that this may apply to small businesses only, but I do come across emails from a businessperson that are shared with a spouse such as "billandtracy@smallbiz.com" I always feel slightly uncomfortable sending a message back, since I don't know who is reading it.

-Nothing more than meaningless marketing jargon on the "About the Company" page, such as "We provide high-end, Web 2.0 solutions to solve the go-to-market strategies of our clients." Huh? What about who founded the company, what is their interesting background, why do they choose to work here and what do they hope to accomplish? (of course, they should have a picture too!)

And if you can find a way to help Typepad wrap long URLs in the comments field, I will send you the chocolate of your choice. I have reverted to the "Tiny URL" solution(no idea as to your "you-r-ell" vs. "earl" conundrum) that you referred to.

Thanks for saving a lot of us a lot of pain.

All the best,
-Pam

[Picky]

I also agree especially on the case sensitive username and limiting characters for usernames, or especially limiting characters for passwords. I can understand extremely odd characters that maybe won't go well when meshed with a site's database, but even that is a weak reason with wide Unicode database implementations.

Not only does making the username case sensitive harder to remember (and usernames are rarely supposed to be the "secure" part of security schemes anyway, which would allow for the username as your email address or even to be displayed in places), but implementing character restrictions makes it easier for hackers to break passwords. It just means there are less passwords available to the user to use.

[Picky]

The list isn't bad, but number 12 is off the mark. I realize that it is a very annoying thing to enter in hard-to-read CAPTCHA codes, but if it were any easier, than computers could read them and beat them. Unfortunately, spammers are willing to go to the efforts to beat Yahoo and Google's CAPTCHA codes where it can, which means they need to make them harder for computers to beat. Adding a small amount of fuzziness is not going to cut it.

Also, I've never seen a CAPTCHA code that was case sensitive on characters like X, S, or Y (and the others like Z) that users would never know either way. Come to think of it, I do not remember ever seeing a case sensitive CAPTCHA at all, but I am probably just forgetting them.

Believe me, I don't have perfect vision (though correctable to 20/20 luckily), and I have had a CAPTCHA "get me" on occasion, but usually a second or two more to fix my problem is no big deal since I recognize what is at stake--on major sites this can be hundreds and thousands of spam messages every week. If it were my business, then I would want to avoid that too.

Bottom line is that if the creators of these images would start to allow the "close enough" ideal to go through than it would get many times easier for computers to guess the on screen representation since the "close enough" ideal would be implemented in a similar character's style equality (L = l = 1 = I). I understand that case insensitivity is a must because then it is just too confusing, but a 36 character variation (case insensitive alphabet + ten digits; probably nine since you lose 0 and maybe even eight by losing 5, but most people use 5 since the top half is noticably boxier than an S in normal fonts).

Also, I have never heard or seen number 2's "defense" given before in my life as a programmer. It is very easy to block requests for pages that users do not have the privileges to see, and a long URL is not one of them. The reason to have long URLs is usually because of a very large amount of searching mixed in with preferences (such as default order: ascending or descending). For example, go to Google and do a normal search and then do an Advanced Search. Notice the URL becomes huge.

A lot of "basic" search boxes hide the options available in Advanced Searches by simply doing the work for you and leaving the rest of the fields blank. In Costco's case, this is not the behavior and the length of their URL seems to be a mix of doing stuff for your and unnecessary complexity (notice they have the same thing repeated a few times: "billiard%20table" where %20 represents a space). Messing around with the URL, you will find out that billiard table is repeated because their search runs your search term through an autocorrection phase (change the "search" part to "billiard%20tabl" [note no e]) and it will have no effect, but change the Ntt part to that and it will inform you of a correction. Interestingly, if you enter it on your first go it will supply both "Ntt" and "search" spelled incorrectly. Again, seems like wasted complexity, but that is neither here nor there and I doubt it has anything to do with security.

[edsel]

Guy,

Another great post! Self-effacing, as usual; you should really take more credit for your thought leadership.

Kinkead Edsellers

[ingwiller]

Guy,

As usual, excellent stuff! Anyway for #14, there wouldn't be compatibility issues if we all use simple plain HTML and Flash just like this website http://www.gamoku.com - you can view it on practically any browser.

[Morgan Ramsay]

Robert Winder wrote: Sure email is a great way to stay in touch for non-critical things, like marketing ...

In your opinion, marketing is noncritical? I'm deeply worried for any business in which you participate.

[Rob]

An or AN?

Sorry Guy, I'm always too quick to assume even though my boss told me long ago never to "assume" because it only makes an "ass out of you and me".

I've never heard URL pronounced as "earl" but others obviously use it:

http://www.eeicommunications.com/eye/utw/98apr.html

http://www.somebits.com/weblog/culture/urlWord.html

So "an URL" will look correct to some and incorrect to others; and most just won't care anyway.

Cheers,

Rob

[Per Wigren]

I use one restriction for allowing comments on public forums: JavaScript must be enabled. Setting a hidden field to a value like 23+12*15 (use different algorithms for each site) with JavaScript and verifying it on the server is a very unobtrusive way to minimize spam. So far no spam bots that I know of run JavaScript...

[shensen]

Spot on! Or more like spot off! I heard you used to park cars at Apple.

[Robert Winder]

Spot on, Guy!

All of your points are right. In true Orwellian fashion though, number 6 is more right than others.

There is no reason to prevent customers from contacting you, and blocking verbal communications is such a lame way to treat the reason you're still in business.

Sure email is a great way to stay in touch for non-critical things, like marketing, but what about when things go pear-shaped and you need to talk?

Put up a phone number, you just might learn something.

[Rob]

A or AN?

Great list and comments. One grammatical note though; it looks like your school teacher, like mine, taught you to always use "an" before a vowel. Hence, "an URL".

I researched this recently and the conclusion of the English language experts I found is that you use "an" when the sound of the following word is a vowel sound. So it should be "a URL" which sounds much more natural than "an URL". This is because “U” begins with a consonant sound, “y”, when spoken. Thus, you wouldn't say "he wore an uniform".

Compare with "an FBI agent" which sounds more natural than "a FBI agent". This is because "F" starts with a vowel sound, "e", when spoken.

Keep up the good work.

Cheers,

Rob

***********

Rob,

Actually, I thought about this a lot. I pronounce "URL" as "earl" not "you-are-el," so that's why I used "an."

The issue is, How is URL supposed to be pronounced?

Guy

[Website Security Services]

Re: #10 and kaykfrink

You're right on this. If you halve the size of the alphabet you need to increase the length of your password by one bit (rather than one character). For short passwords this is more than covered by a single additional character.

Note that for longer passwords you may need to add several characters to get an equivalent level of security. For instance if your case-insensitive alphabet has 32 characters (reduced from say 64, for the sake of argument), one extra character will make up for halving the alphabet of a password with 5 characters or less, since a 5 bit string has 32 possible values.

For decent security your password should probably be longer than 5 characters. For a 5-10 character password you'll need to add 2 characters to get equivalent security. For 10-15 you'll need to add 3, and so on.

Once again it becomes an issue of balancing the risk of annoying your users and the risk of attackers getting into your site. This balance is more delicate than I previously suggested.

Thanks for catching my mistake.

[Mike Maddaloni]

Hi Guy - This is a great list - you had problems with Verizon too? That's why I switched to T-Mobile, but I digress.

In response to #14 - developing a truly cross-browser may be a lot of work, but the reason it is not done is usually laziness or lack of awareness of one's audience. If you're a PC shop, picking up a Mac Mini is small money to cross-test your sites.

[Wayne Botha]

Agree on the need for search function for large sites. I dislike the search functions that bring back many, many hits from within a website. How many important documents can a search from a retailer have? I would like to see a standard for seach engine functionality on websites.

[pixelchutes]

Guy,

Great list! Many of the points made here can be the difference between conversion %, # registered, $ bottom line, etc.

These methodologies are indeed catered to an evolving WWW--2.0 or not--and have additional, unmentioned benefits, as well.

Cheers!

[John C. Randolph]

The #1 offender for item #1 is the real estate business. Pushy, pushy, pushy.

-jcr

[Dan]

I agree in part, but not all sites are trying to achieve the same goals. The site I work for used to include del.icio.us and digg links, but took them off because they generated worthless traffic. Similarly, email and RSS feeds are not fundamentally necessary if your content doesn't lend itself naturally to these technologies.

[Extra Character]

Good blog Guy. Your "The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption" list contained twelve of my pet peeves.

[Shareware Software]

Good Tips! Thank You!

[Kefka]

Captchas are evil. They limit computer use for people with disabilities. :(

[Etaoin Shrdlu]

Another no-no is not allowing "+" characters in e-mail addresses.

"Plussed" addresses (like all GMAIL) addresses allow characters following the "+" to be ignored, thus giving a convenient way of tagging addresses to see if the website sells the e-mail addresses it collects to spammers.

For example, one could say his address is "BozoTezino+BiggySoft@webmail.con" whenever registering on the Biggysoft website.

Any mail not pertaining to Biggysoft products received but sent to "BozoTezino+BiggySoft@webmail.con" would be a dead giveaway that Biggysoft sells their contacts to spammers.

[David Magda]

Sites that do not allow '+' in the e-mail address. It's perfectly valid according to the RFCs and it allows me to filter things on my end. So something like

dmagda+jan29_2007@ee.ryerson.ca

or

dmagda+test_com@ee.ryerson.ca

allows me to track where things come from, and if I ever start getting junk from one particular place creating a filter is dead simple.

[kaykfrink]

Re: Number 10 and Website Security Services

I agree with number ten based both on the fact that is simplifies password entry and remembrance, but also because you really don't loose that much security. If you halve the number of characters, you don't need to double the length of the password to make up for it, you just need to add one. The math of passwords is exponential, not multiplicative. If, for example, you allow lower and upper case characters, plus the digits 0-9, each character in a password can be one of 62 possibilities. Now say somebody makes a four character long password. The number of possible passwords at that length is 62 ^ 4 = 14,776,336. If you take away the upper case letters, you now have 36 ^ 4 = 1,679,616 possibilities. If you just increase the length to 5 though, you now have 36 ^ 5 = 60,466,176 possibilities, and you have more than made up for the loss of possible characters.

[Annon]

= The Top Ten Things That Mildly Annoy Me When I'm Surfing (?)

[frank]

I am just seeing if number 11 is true for this blog.

I guess not, but you still have #12.

Long live trying to sell things on your blog!

[Matt C]

re: point #14 I've found that "supporting" Internet Explorer is a tremendous amount of work.

There are objective ways to measure compliance with W3C's HTML rendering standards, and IE is the absolute worst in every comparison.

So it's not those "other browsers" that are the problem. Breaking my site code in the specific ways IE wants me to costs about 15% of my development time.

Between Macintosh users and PC FireFox users, that's what, 30% of the internet? How is that a reasonable portion of the market to ignore? Last time I checked my logs IE 6/7 was only about 60% of net traffic.

Those statistics don't mean bollocks. What does matter is your particular audience. Face it, your "total addressable market" is not your actual market. I operate igda-sandiego.org where 22% of the visitors use Internet Explorer and 18% use Firefox. The other 60% are either bots or outlier browsers such as Safari and Opera.

Wisdom: Entertain your audience, feed the hungry, etc.

Enforced immediate registration.

This req