Poking around the Genentech Web site for some contact information, I noticed in the footer a stylish, simple way of asking for visitor feedback:
I thought, hey, this is a nice graphical approach. A visitor can quickly get the idea of what’s going on: negative/low level of yellow for a “poor” Web site experience and positive/high yellow for a “good” experience. Unfortunately, when you click on the box, what you actually get is:
Holy! I particularly enjoy question 1: “How would you classify yourself?” How about “annoyed and somewhat overwhelmed by your crazed quest for superficial knowledge?” Everything I’ve read tells me that, although nicely compact, this form is a scanning nightmare. My approximation of such would be:
Really, isn’t the only question that you’d care about the very last one? “Did you find what you were looking for?” and if not, why? What was missing? This entire form could be reduced to two radio buttons and a text area.
January 24th, 2008
Ok. A bit of full disclosure. I’m on the Weight Watchers, but I have to say, their Plan Manager online e-tool is slick (albeit in Flash so I can’t gleep anything thank-you-very-much), but I just discovered this little easter egg the other day:
So, ignore the fact that I’ve been doing this program for two months and I’ve only NOW gotten past six glasses of water a day. But hey, I got a smiley face — a reward for exploring the interface (Flickr has a lot of these hidden features for advanced users). And so I explored. Yes, you get more smilies for noshing on your fruit and vege. Kawaii! You can also drag and drop items from your favorite (oft snarfed) foods into your Food Tracker (aka: your daily journal). Journaling being a big part of WW, this little e-tool sure makes it far more bearable than doing it with the old pen and paper where you have to tally up your own points using an abacus. It’s like the bygone days when TVs only had four channels and you had to get off your butt to change the program. But did you get a cute smiley face if you successfully accomplished that? No. No, you did not.
January 10th, 2008