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You Made Two Fatal Errors! Website Usabilty NO NOs
By Shalom Issenberg | June 20, 2008
Today I came up with a new interesting business idea. Unfortunately it requires a Canadian business presence and I am currently located far from Canada. No problem, I’ll open up a Canadian corporation online. Which brings me to the first problem: Incorporating in Canada.
Step 1: search Incorporation Canada via Google.
Step 2: Visit About-com’s page related to incorporating in Canada.
Step 3: Eventually find the http://www.oncorp.com/ link and click there to begin setting up my new Ontario Corporation online.
Now here are their two fatal mistakes in their websites usability:
Fatal error #1: about.com maintains the sessions by serving the link’s page inside a frame. This means that as long as I am inside the about.com frame I cannot sign up for services as cookie settings, required by the site, can not be utilized. This is fatal error #1 as it renders 99% of traffic from about.com useless. My advice - if your site requires cookies, script it with an alternative so that if sessions can not be started or maintained due to web browser settings - redirect to a lead form; At the very least!
But as an experienced internet user I recognized the problem and bypassed about.com knowing that the site error was caused by the frame. Now I am at the application process…
Fatal error #2: OEY VHEY, the first thing they do is ask me for my credit card information. Are you crazy? My advice here is to make users go through the application process and then ask for credit card details. The majority of users will back out once prompted to give credit card details, your best chance in getting the conversion is to make users more committed to the action by taking them further into the process. A larger percentage of the interested users will complete the funnel if the credit card payment is the last thing requested after they have already committed to the bulk of the process. It’s like the joke about the guy who swam half way across the lake got tired and turned around to swim back. If they have gone most of the way they will complete the process except for those who were really not interested or are unable to pay. Putting the payment at the beginning is not helpful and is totally unnecessary.
To oncorp.com and any others who have made the same foolish mistakes… my advice is to get some professional website usability consulting!
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