What’s wrong with this picture? It always surprises me when major sites with huge traffic and stable of full-time developers have features that are fundamentally broken. Check out this screenshot from Bizrate.com (click picture to see full sized image)

Bizrate testominial entry screen

How many characters left?

What’s wrong?

  1. It only gives me 255 characters. This is probably because they have chosen to store the text in a fixed-length database field for rapid retrieval. That’s what happens when the usability people and the marketing people get overrruled by some engineer who thinks that this minor efficiency improvement is sufficient reason to cripple the interface.
  2. It doesn’t tell me anywhere how many characters I’m allowed. It wasn’t until I submitted my original version that it rejected it and came back and told me there was a 255 character limit.
  3. It has no running count of characters used. This has become a standard feature everywhere else. We’re used to it on Twitter and most places that have low character limitations.

So what? Well, it took me three tries to get my feedback accepted. And by the time I did, the glowing testimonial I had for the merchant was gone. No room left.

All the merchant got out of this was my comment that I think they should make their free shipping offer appear more prominently on the page.

What the merchant did not get was my comment that when I factored in free shipping, their price was significantly better than the competitor’s price.

Okay, I just placed the order, so I can’t comment on speed of delivery and all that, but I would say that the shopping experience on US-Mattress.com was close to ideal. It’s easy to navigate, there are no real surprises (except why did they offer to let me upgrade to “standard front door” delivery for $49? What is the delivery I’m getting for free?).

Anyway, the bad part is that I agreed to do the Bizrate survey because I like to reward e-commerce merchants who do it “right”. I arrived at the survey with a good feeling, wanting to leave a great testimonial. But the frustrations of using Bizrate’s system left me feeling, well… frustrated. Of course, I don’t hold US-Mattress responsible, at least not consciously, but that’s the thing about usability problems — often they operate on a sub-conscious level. The good feeling I had upon completing the purchase is now forever associated with the stupid Bizrate survey.

And then, there’s Bizrate’s enticements to get you to take the survey, promising all sorts of free stuff. Obviously, everyone who spends a lot of time on the net knows by now that these are not “rewards”, but affiliate offers from which Bizrate makes additional income, but that’s a whole other story.

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Filed under: Consumer Chronicles

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