Don’t kick your users away

Running a service website and making it successful is always tough. And that’s why only very few of sites become smash hits while some remain as mediocre for ages and get faded away. When you compare the hit sites with mediocre site, the only difference we would always see is USABILITY coupled with SIMPLENESS.

Forget usability, some site drive away people right from the registration page. Today I thought of placing an advertisement about transferring my JTC. I placed this advertisement with some sites that offer to post free advertisements. I am OK with some sites, even though they required me to get registered at first and showed unclear clumsy highly RSA “look” encrypted Word Verification. But there was one particular site (88DB) and that annoyed and drove me crazy.

See I was there to quickly post an advertisement. If I have to register myself by giving my email-id just in case for verification, I am perfectly alright. But why in the world are you asking me to fill in really un necessary information like age, salary, education etc? And these fields are mandatory. Every time I click register the site was continuously coming up with an error message asking me to fill in some unwanted detail. And there is another laughable mandatory field: what are the services you are interested in? (with numerous check boxes). Really are you aware of current trends in web design and user interaction?

Congratulations! Just now you have kicked a customer out and away from your site.

Ask little from user. Get him hooked in. Show some of your interesting stuff. Let him play and let him get a hang of your site. If he likes you, he gives other information. Do not push the user unless you run the site just for fun.