It took me about five attempts to submit a customer service complaint to the NYTimes using their online form the other day. It would be absolutely trivial to fix this glitch. Yahoo! Answers has the same annoying “feature” on their site. Don’t these companies employ usability specialists? (Uhm, or doesn’t somebody there use their own sites and care to improve the user experience?*)

Here is what happened. The form on the NYTimes home delivery customer service page is a big empty box waiting to be filled out. But when you fill it out even just halfway, you are told that you have used too many characters. You can only submit the form with 250 characters or less.

However, the form neither counts the number of characters for you nor gives you any hints about the permitted length based on the size of the box.

So I kept revising and revising until finally the site accepted my note. How hard would it be to offer a smaller box AND let the user know how many characters have already been entered? (I won’t even dare suggest they accept longer forms.) Other forms do this so it can’t be that impossible.

Consider that the reason the customer is on this site is likely due to something that has gone wrong with their customer experience, so what are the chances that they want to be annoyed further?

Another example of this same issue comes up on Yahoo! Answers. There is a limit on the length of comment you can leave on a resolved question. But there is no indication of the extent to which you went over the character limit. Users are contributing free content to the site, it’s not a good idea to alienate them by offering annoying experiences.

While I understand that unnecessarily long commentary could be inconvenient in both cases, the 250 and 300 character limits seem excessive in both cases.

* Yes, I realize the complexity at these organizations and understand that just because a couple of employees know of a problem, it doesn’t mean that it will be solved.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 12:19 am and is filed under IT/Comm, Products/Services, Web sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.