Just signed up for a new service and clicked on the terms of service to see them; I’m masochistic that way. The culprit today is Freshbooks, but they’re by no means unique.
At 3230 words, and with an average reading speed of 230 words per minute, that’s 14 minutes of lovely legalese. For services to be easy to use, we try to shave seconds of the signup process and some companies think they can demand 14 minutes of my time for this shit?
I know it’s CYA for them to have these terms. Yet enough companies have absurdly bad clauses in their TOS that I feel dirty every time I click “accept” without reading. What’s buried in those terms that could hurt me?
Considered as part of the user experience, it’s frankly baffling that companies continue to demand our time and leaving us fearful of their intentions.
1- The forgotten password
We all forget passwords. So you click on that link on the login form, and you’re greeted with a blank text field for your email address.
And it’s usually blank, even if you already entered an email on the login page. How stupid is that?
2 - Is that VISA or MasterCard?
It happens every time I have to give my card information over the phone. On nearly every website with a checkout form, you usually have a drop-down.
That’s stupid, because if you have a credit card number, you already know who issued it. Wikipedia has a list of credit card prefixes. Mastercard starts with 51-55, VISA with 4.
3 - 90210, that’s in New York, right?
A simple search will tell you that’s Beverly Hills, CA. This one’s not nearly as trivial as my first two points to implement. Still, asking someone someone to input city, postal code and state is annoying, pointless and adds the possibility of error.
4 - English or Français on splash pages
Our browsers already tell servers what language they want pages served in. We have cookies to track these types of preferences. Yet the Canadian government still insists that every time I go to a department web site, I’m asked: Français / English?
Taking their cue from government, businesses do the same thing, which leads me to my last pet peeve.
5 - ATMs suck
Besides their outrageous fees, every time I visit another bank’s ATM, they ask me the language question. And then they ask me what operation I want to do, with only ONE choice: Withdrawal.
Pretty stupid, no? But my bank tops that. No language choice - but it asks me which account I want to withdraw money from. Even though I only have one chequing account with them.
There are a lot of small details that can add up to a pleasant, friction-less experience. Most of them don’t take that much effort. I believe it’s a responsibility on our part to create interfaces that are as simple as possible, so that people feel empowered.
Anyone have other examples they can share?