Joel N RendleSearch Engine OptimisationMake Contact with Joel

Joel N Rendle, Senior E-commerce Consultant

Deliberate Errors

Did you bother to work it out, or did you just mindlessly click the link, hoping I'd tell you the answers?  If you were lazy, go back and work it out for yourself first.

For those who did have an attempt, how do your answers compare to these answers? 

  • The form has a field that is meaningless ("Type of Request").  Meaningless fields are one more way to stop potential customers from contacting you.  Why put obstacles in their way?  Many companies do this, far too often.  If a field isn't required, do you really need it?
  • Non-existant or - worse - misleading form field validation.  Far too often I see companies with poor project management methodologies ending up building pages where developers have a guess at validation.  If you need a phone number to be given in a particular format, provide an example to your user.  But if you don't give an example, never fail the validation just because your customer couldn't guess at what you needed.  That's just throwing sales away!
  • A "Notes" field (or, it could also be "Further Information", "Other Detail", "Special Request, etc).  Allowing the customer to provide you with non-specific information provides an excellent opportunity to get unsolicited feedback.  You might get positive feedback that can be passed around staff, posted to the intranet, or put into a company magazine.  You might find constructive criticism that can be used to help in staff training.  You might even get a sales lead.  Or you might get garbage than can be dealt with appropriately.  But ask yourself - why wouldn't you allow customers to talk to you?
  • Combined FirstName-LastName.  It has always amused me how many websites create different text boxes for names.  Unless there's an excellent (and I mean excellent) lead generation, profiling, or customer management tool in your business, you probably don't need to break down the full names of your customers.  So don't put an extra barrier to contacting you in their way.
  • Don't treat your customers like they're idiots.  Why do many websites ask you to type your email address in twice?  The answer, of course, is so that you don't mis-type it, and then they can't contact you.  But why is the company making the assumption about you that you're too stupid to get your email address right?  They don't ask you to type your phone number in twice.  And how many customers simply copy and paste the first entry anyway?  Treat your customers like they are morons, and they'll quickly show their appreciation to your competitors.

Now, here's an example of someone who gets it right:  The UK bank, Alliance & Leicester, have really nailed form filling.  Check out this screenshot. They've got error messages in red, next to the relevant box (and even used green for non-compulsory-but-still-important fields), and a helpful red 'X' next to those required fields which have been missed.  I give them 8 marks out of 10 for this effort.  They're let down by a non-compulsory middle name field (if the Marketing or Legal Team need this, then make it compulsory, otherwise leave it out and don't alienate customers with no middle names), and a spurious 'Confirm Email' box, which is doubly-unnecessary since 'Email Address' itself isn't a required field.  However, a good result from Alliance & Leicester in a field marred by poor competitors.

 

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