View your fonts before use
I received an email message from Amazon UK, of the usual “Since you bought A you may like B” type.
I looked at the prices, and something seemed a bit strange…
The List Price clearly states £10.00, while the Our Price is a whooping £14.99. Followed by the statement You Save:, which obviously should be You Get Ripped Of:.
Nearly took a screen shot and sent it to the appropriate places like NTK’s Doh, The Humanity! or BBSpot’s BBloopers.
Instead I decided to check the website first. And lo and behold! the List Price is £19.99.
Off I went back to the message, and checked the actual message text, and true enough, the price was £19.99. The message was sent as HTML, and contained it’s own formatting and font definitions. So in this lovely small font, the 9, after being covered by the strike-through style, looked exactly like a 0.
Is this then not a bad mistake, since they didn’t in fact present a negative discount? Or is this even more of a mistake since customers thought they were getting a negative discount when the system was working properly?
I tend towards the latter. Design should not hurt customer experience when everything else is fine, especially not when probably a lot of time and money where invested in selfsame design.
Lesson: If you’re going to play with the way the text looks, make sure to check how the text actually looks.
I looked at the prices, and something seemed a bit strange…
The List Price clearly states £10.00, while the Our Price is a whooping £14.99. Followed by the statement You Save:, which obviously should be You Get Ripped Of:.
Nearly took a screen shot and sent it to the appropriate places like NTK’s Doh, The Humanity! or BBSpot’s BBloopers.
Instead I decided to check the website first. And lo and behold! the List Price is £19.99.
Off I went back to the message, and checked the actual message text, and true enough, the price was £19.99. The message was sent as HTML, and contained it’s own formatting and font definitions. So in this lovely small font, the 9, after being covered by the strike-through style, looked exactly like a 0.
Is this then not a bad mistake, since they didn’t in fact present a negative discount? Or is this even more of a mistake since customers thought they were getting a negative discount when the system was working properly?
I tend towards the latter. Design should not hurt customer experience when everything else is fine, especially not when probably a lot of time and money where invested in selfsame design.
Lesson: If you’re going to play with the way the text looks, make sure to check how the text actually looks.
October 4th, 2004 at 19:30 EET | Categories: Marketing, Web |
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May 12th, 2010 at 8:59
This is great to follow! Thanks!
August 19th, 2010 at 4:56
Real fine writing! Keep it up!