There are so many lists of top 10 this and top 10 that I decided that this week, here in the Network World Web Applications Newsletter, I’d give you my Top 10 Web application issues:
No. 10: Errors. Every time your Web app bombs or a page isn’t available and you show me a load of mumbo-jumbo crappy diagnostics from whatever platform you’re using or a standard 404 (or whatever) error page you’re reporting I know that you haven’t really paid enough attention. Sure, unexpected problems arise but have the intelligence to hide your problems under a veneer of “we’re so sorry but we’ve got this covered”. How confident you appear matters to how confident I feel in you.
No. 9: Dates. Your content is unlikely to eternal. Post something without a date and I will probably not be able to find whatever context you had for whatever you are offering whether it’s a blog posting, a load of data, or a recipe. Once you let me down this way – once I have to go digging around to see if your offering is still relevant and useful – even if it turns out to be what I wanted, you’ve made me work harder than I want to. I may not come back.
No. 8: Costs. What are you charging? Don’t make it mission impossible for me to see what you charge for whatever you do; make it easy. Be up front. You won’t make me feel more inclined to cough up my hard-earned dough if, after I find out how wonderful you are, I feel there’s a mismatch in what you offer and what you charge.
No. 7: Terms. If you bury the “gotchas” in your terms and conditions you run a huge risk of alienating me when I finally figure out what they are. Few people have the time or inclination to dig into legalize so if you have to have a complicated T&C give me the executive overview.
No. 6: Beauty. Poor presentation does not help you sell your product or service. If you don’t know Helvetica from a hole in the ground and you aren’t sure that avocado isn’t a good color for a bathroom then hire a graphic designer. Hell, hire one anyway. No matter what you may have been told or may think, there’s no getting over ugly.
No. 5: Credit. While we all understand that you want to acquire paying customers the practice of requiring a credit card for the 30 days (or whatever) trial and then charging us if we don’t explicitly cancel is just cheesy. Even cheesier is the demand that we can only cancel by talking to a customer service rep over the phone who is only be available from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Hawaiian time on every fifth Thursday after Labor Day.
No. 4: Feedback. When we post a problem in your forum alongside identical complaints from 40 or 50 other people and you haven’t responded after six months, we know you don’t care. How arrogant or stupid do you have to be to see that we will eventually understand that you don’t care?
No. 3: Outsourcing. We get it; you have limited resource for the funds you have available for customer support but when you outsource using people who know nothing, thank you for every response you make, and generally waste our time doing the best they can to block us from speaking to level two support or their supervisor we recognize that you don’t care. We will eventually leave you.
No. 2: Lock in. Trying to lock us in to your service by not integrating with our desktop apps and popular online tools does not make us happy. We have a whole universe of services and tools to take advantage of and unless you are somehow unique in the entire cosmos (which is beyond unlikely) you can be replaced. This we will eventually do and sooner than you think.
No. 1: Value. I already mentioned the issue of value in what you offer when I talked about cost but value is also a moving target. If your product or service doesn’t keep moving forward and getting better and providing greater value (whatever that might mean in your market), you will eventually become irrelevant and we will go elsewhere.
So, tell me: In the Web applications you use or those that you build, are my top 10 issues being addressed? If not, why not? If they are, then tell me what you’re using or what you’ve built because I’ve never seen a unicorn.
