Junecloud

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Stupid Things That Web Sites Do

Far too often I see a site do something that just doesn’t make sense. Here are just a few of these blunders.

Playing music automatically… and then playing a video without pausing it. It’s amazing how often I see this with Flash movie web sites. You go to the site and music starts playing. You click a button to play the trailer. A new window opens. The trailer starts playing… and the music continues to play, clashing with the trailer horribly. You’re then forced to go back to the main window and hunt for the little control to turn the music off. One site didn’t even show the controls for the movie, so you couldn’t pause it while you’re digging for the off button, nor rewind once you’ve found it.

Budweiser gets it right. When a commercial opens in a new window, the main Flash site is paused entirely, and dimmed out slightly with a “reactivate” button.

Working against habit. Cingular.com is a great example here. To check your account there is a series of three small fields to enter your phone number. After you type the first three digits, it automatically jumps to the next field. It seems helpful, because it’s annoying to deal with three separate fields. The problem is that many people are used to hitting tab to go to the next field. The result is that I hit tab at the same time it skips to the next field… and I end up missing a field entirely. It’s difficult to undo habits, and that’s too much for a site to be asking. They’ve tried to patch up a problem when they should have fixed the problem itself. They could easily use a single field, with some simple error-checking to transparently remove any non-number characters. They could also provide an example next to the field, showing an example of how the number should be entered (if they’re worried people will leave out the area code, for example).

Changing form values without bothering to tell anyone about it. Even worse if it’s a password! This isn’t a common mistake, but it’s such an obviously bad thing that I can’t believe anyone would do it. I placed an order at ClubMac.com today. My password had special characters in it. It replaced these characters with spaces, without saying a word. Fortunately I was able to email the password to myself to find out what it had done. I don’t like doing that though, as email is not secure. This situation would be far better resolved with an error message saying the password cannot include special characters. Better yet, revise the code so that special characters don’t cause problems!

Using javascript:history.back(); for a “previous page” link. Come on now. I want to get to the previous page on your site, not the last page I was looking at. Everyone knows how to use the back button, you don’t need to provide one for us.

Trying too hard to protect your content. I was at Pictage.com looking at photo’s from a friend’s wedding. The site is poorly designed and I wanted to keep my “favorites” open in a second window, to make sure it was actually marking the photos I told it to. (It wasn’t.) On right-clicking I was presented with a dialog telling me how to use the shopping cart. I clicked OK. I tried again. Same thing. Then I realized: they’ve tried to disable right-clicking to prevent people from saving the photos. The photos aren’t even high-quality… They’re over-compressed and watermarked.

Face it: if you’re letting people download your content to a browser, they can just as easily save it to disk. Whether viewing the source for the address of the image, taking a screenshot, or just dragging it to the desktop like you can in many browsers, there are plenty of ways to save an image, no matter how hard you try to stop it. If somebody really wants to steal your content, they’ll get their tech-savvy buddy to help them out. Simply focusing on a quality site design would do much more to ensure sales. The site was so frustrating to use that I was tempted not to bother.

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