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Wednesday, April 14, 2010

How popular websites irritate their clients?

To make a product successful, promotion of the product is always needed. Good Promotion of a bad product can also make the product successful. But sometimes bad promotion strategy can also irritate the users which ultimately puts negative impact on success of the product.

Recently I was checking my mails on yahoo.com when a green box started to appear on the top of the page. It was about access the Yahoo! Toolbar from more than one location.


First, I don't have Yahoo! Toolbar on my system, so this message should not display to me.

Also, I don’t want to install the Toolbar but there was no way to do so. There were only two options:
          • Either I add the toolbar with my Yahoo! ID
          • Or Save it to the computer

When I clicked the cross on the upper corner, the box is closed but appeared again after few second. I tried many times but the green box opens every time. Remember, last time when I wanted to install yahoo messenger on my system, it always failed :) and now when I don’t want to add the Toolbar, they were forcing me to add it.

Anyway I clicked on the ‘Learn more’ given in the box to learn how to close this box. See what I found:


Interestingly I was using Firefox and it was suggesting me how to get rid off from this box on Internet Explorer. What the purpose of user manual if user can’t find appropriate help?

At last, I decided to logout from my yahoo account rather than trying to close that irritating green box.

Any Comments?

5 comments:

Ajay Balamurugadas said...

Hi Mohit,
Very irritating indeed!!!

You seemed to be as irritated as I was when I faced this issue: http://bit.ly/9RgmTb

Regards,
Ajay Balamurugadas

Mohit said...

Hi Ajay,

Yes, It was kind of same feeling :)

Santhosh Tuppad said...

@Mohit,
Sometimes we shouldn't get irritated by seeing bugs which depends on what context we are using the product. If you see SurveyMonkey, it is used many customers but it has numerous bugs. So, it is serving the purpose and many do not get irritated. Probably when their competitors come they might think of fixing those.

Thanks,
Santhosh Shivanand Tuppad

Mohit said...

@Santhosh
What you are saying is correct but the companies should also evaluate the impact of their doings.

In the above example, they were insisting me to add the yahoo toolbar on my browser. If they provide a cancel button in the green box then i didn't have a problem but when I could not close the box, instead of adding the tool bar, i decided to leave the site instantly. Finally who was in loss? - Yahoo!!

With Regards
Mohit

Santhosh Tuppad said...

@Mohit,
You are absolutely right my friend. Competitors might understand what they are lacking when compared to their competitors and try to improve the user experience which will get them more customers but most of them do not do that and there are so many obvious bugs dancing in front of you :)

AOL - This is also in the competitors list but these people do not display the captcha itself which doesn't load but there is a captcha which we need to enter. When it is not displayed ( text or characters ) how would end-user register and become user of AOL?

May be by not displaying captcha is in as-designed to have more security LOL :P.

Thanks,
Santhosh Shivanand Tuppad