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

[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!