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.

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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.

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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.

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Comments

[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.

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