DesignMarketing & CommunicationsUsability
Bad dog!: Web mistakes encountered in the pet industry
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Filed under Design, Marketing & Communications, Usability
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We recently bought a puppy. He’s great.
In preparing for our new puppy’s arrival into our home, I did a lot of research on the Web: how to train a dog, supplies needed…all that stuff. In the course of doing this research, I was amazed at how many Web design and usability no-nos I encountered on pet-related sites. I’ll explore some of them in this post.
Requiring too much user information
If you have a pet - and even if you don’t - you’ve probably heard of The Dog Whisperer. His name is Cesar Millan, and he has a TV show where he rehabilitates dogs whose owners have seriously messed them up. Pretty impressive dog-training skills if he’s the real deal. But I can’t say the same for his website.
I visited Cesar Millan’s website, and noticed in the top-right corner a box where I could sign up for his newsletter. When I entered my email address and clicked what I thought was the ‘subscribe’ button, I was taken to another page that asked for even more information from me. It’s bad enough that I was tricked into thinking that I was subscribing when I just gave my email. Why do they require so much extra information just to send me a newsletter? There’s even a field for my cell phone number!
As a result of all this, I decided not to subscribe after all.
Restricted content
“Clicker Training” is the most effective animal training technique in use, and Karen Pryor made it popular in the canine world. I wanted to learn more about it, so I visited clickertraining.com. Unfortunately, in the ironically titled section “Learn”, I was only shown the first paragraph of every article, followed by the sentence “Full text available to registered users only.”
Restricted content is incredibly frustrating to visitors. Again, the fact that you need my personal information before you’ll let me read an article is suspicious: my personal information has nothing to do with your content; what do you plan to do with it?
And if this content is available to registered members only, why was I able to get to it through your main menu as if it’s regular content?
Coaxing me to register by offering extra content to members is one thing, but doing so by dangling only disjointed chunks of all your articles in front of me like carrots in front of a donkey? No thanks.
Choice paralysis
Dr. Ian Dunbar is one of the world’s most respected dog behaviorists. He’s written all kinds of books on the subject and even hosts a podcast. He decided to make what he claimed would be the “be-all-end-all” website for dog training, dogstardaily.com.
Dunbar’s goal of achieving this has caused a problem though: Choice paralysis. It’s been determined that if you provide users with too much choice, they’ll be less likely to choose anything. The number of options they can choose from simply becomes overwhelming.
On dogstardaily.com, I have no idea where to look. I don’t know what I should do first. There are 2,022 words on the Home page. Am I expected to read all that?? There is a navigation menu under the wordmark at the top, but it’s very easy to miss.
They seem to be aware of this problem somewhat, since they’ve added the always-embarrassing page, “How to use this site,” located in the equally problematic “Quicklinks” menu.
Distracting animation
I did manage to find a site with some truly useful information, but as I began to read the articles there, another problem manifested itself: distracting animation.
Dogtime.com has a sidebar on the left that contains a navigation menu. Unfortunately, it also contains a component called “Media Center”, which is essentially a looping video of a dog doing something cute. When I first checked it, I saw a litter of pug pups turning their heads in unison. At the time of this writing, I see two boxers on a treadmill. Like I said…cute.
I’m not there to see something cute. I’m trying to read your article. But I keep getting distracted by the movement going on in the corner of the screen. This is still common on many websites, often taking the form of Flash-based ‘flair’ animation that doesn’t really serve any purpose.
It was enough to make me lose interest in whatever potentially informative content they may have and leave.
Conclusion
On the Web, your reputation is proportional to quality of your site. In the physical world, you wouldn’t hire a clown to distract visitors from entering your store. You wouldn’t ask customers for their phone numbers as soon as they walk in. So why do it on your website?
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because your website is there, people will use it. Yours is one of millions of other websites they could be spending their valuable time on; you need to work hard to keep their attention.
