Show Some Respect For Your Users

For the past three years Drew McLellan has been editing 24 Ways—a site which comes to life twenty-four days before Christmas and publishes one article a day. Articles focus on web standards, usability, client-side coding, and the like.

This post by Brian Oberkirch really caught my attention: A Gift Idea For Your Users: Respect, Yo. In short, it’s a reminder to

• be empathetic to your users by cutting down on omnipresent visual clutter (Google’s Spartan home page used as a good example);
• set defaults in a way that doesn’t force people to disclose every bit of information about themselves only to satisfy your craving to spam them with product offers;
• make it simple to cancel service and walk away;
• set correct expectations by being honest and avoid cheap hype.

If I could survey IT managers, I’m positive that the majority of them would prefer to have people fill out lengthy forms to collect any and all information and become targets of “market research”, up- and cross-selling, demographic analysis, etc. This is contrary to the spirit of empathy and respect.

Here’s a good example. Every time I sign up for a user group meeting at Microsoft’s Click to Attend, they try to bait me by pre-selecting contact options:

I deselect them every single time, but have to go through it again and again. It’s a part of my profile so go ahead and record my choices. Don’t bait me hoping I will let my guard down one day. Either this is sloppy coding or somebody needs to talk common sense into their pointy-haired boss.

Show some respect, yo!

Microsoft completely pisses me off with that Click to Attend sneakiness. We've started using CtA a few months ago for registering people for our UG meetings, and it's actually made things look more professional, and is great for gathering good attendee data, but I'm sure this is pissing people off every time they sign up.

Let me know when you can speak at the Fairfield / Westchester .NET UG on web usability. I'm really looking forward to that one.

= Mark