My, I am having a ranty evening.
As well as the issues with the BT website highlighted in an earlier post today, I’ve just been reminded of another totally thoughtless piece of design that is common to many sites. That is: the “contact us” option.
I can clearly see that it’s useful to provide a number of pre-configured options to enable better descriptions of problems to be entered and so that issues can be routed to the right people, but it’s so common not to see an option for queries that don’t fit any of the specified list.
BT’s website is a good example and I know I’m not the only person who has run into it, but they’re far from the only culprit. I visited a website today and tried to buy something only to get the message “There was a problem processing your order”. That’s an utterly unhelpful message to start with, because it provides no useful information. What sort of problem? At what stage of the ordering process? Stock levels? Card payment? What?
So I found the “contact us” links on the site and whilst they provide forms for dealing with orders that have been taken or shipped, and forms to help work out exactly what part to order, there’s absolutely nothing that fits “the order process didn’t work and I’d like to know what’s going on so it can be corrected”. So, they lose a sale and I have to purchase from another supplier when they were my preferred choice. And it’s now probably likely that I’ll prefer to use another supplier from now on.
Their loss.