Ordinary Nothing

The login page to Hotmail has, beside the required address and password fields, various links to other content from other MSN services. Usually written as supposedly catchy phrases some PR flunky came up with to draw click-throughs.
And when you put a commercial, even if it’s a commercial to yourself, on a page that lots of people go to, you usually try to get them right. I bet they use a spell checker all the time. Making a spelling error would look really bad, after all.
The problem with spell checkers is that they find misspelled words (Well, that’s also the point of spell checkers, true. Maybe the problem is that sometime people forget that this is all what a spell checker does). They do not find wrong words which are properly spelled.

For example suppose you had an article or, a bunch of articles, like Hotmail had today, talking about various real-estate issues. What sort of text would you use to link to it? Maybe if you work for MSN, you’d like to write something like (And I’m just guessing here) 10 must-know real estate terms. Possible, no? Especially if the page linked to at the time doesn’t mention anything about real estate terms but does offer content like 7 Ways to save for your… and 8 Tips for and so on.
Well, making such a link, talking about an actual service you don’t provide, but pointing to other content in the same general area, may not be something you or I would do. That would be a misleading advertisement of sort, perhaps. Decent companies don’t do that.
What decent companies, like Microsoft, would do, is create a link to
10 most-know real estate terms
Stands to reason, no? I mean, you’ve got various 10 most-wanted lists, so it makes sense to have a 10 most know list. Nothing strange there at all. Nobody who gets paid to write these things can be expected to notice that something is slightly off there, now can they?

And maybe it also means that nobody on their payroll bothers to read those links when if they log in to the Hotmail accounts? I saw the same link with the same text there for hours. They should perhaps take this like a focus group result, or usability review, and cancel the whole thing… Saves everyone time and money…

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.

Yet another interesting radio commercial. This time for a local bank. Started out interesting. They were talking about how complicated it is to do many banking operations, with lots of forms to fill, and things you need to remember to do. Creating a clear expectation to hear that they have done perhaps some serious workflow changes at their bank, making all your banking operations simpler and easier. Then they started to detail exactly what is it that has become simpler and hassle free:

1. When you transfer your account to them from another bank, they handle all the details for you. You need hardly do anything. Just sign for the transfer, and it’s done.

Yes. That’s it. Unlike other banks, it’s easy to transfer to them. Naturally they didn’t feel any need to tell you why is their bank any better at other banking services. Because usually what most bank customers do most of the time is transfer to another bank. Maybe they’re trying to go for the multitude of people that really hate their bank, but don’t particularly prefer any other one, so that if one saves them a hassle, it’ll be chosen…

Heard a wonderful radio commercial recently. They were trying to sell a certain new book (surprising by itself, I don’t hear much book commercials on the radio), and to use one of the old tried and tested concept of telling you that the product must be good since so many people buy it. A One billion flies can’t be wrong! Eat s–t. sort of thing. And the more sweeping the demand for the product is, the better it must be, of course. So if it has a huge demand in even some tiny and remote off-the-charts places, the product just has to be really great. Stands to reason. Imagine my surprise then, between the lines about how amazing a book it is, fascinating, gripping, and so on and so forth, to hear, in a voice quivering with excitement, the equivalent of Over one million copies sold in the United States alone!. I mean, if the tiny population of the US managed to create enough demand to buy one whole million copies of the book, why, it must be a smashing success. Imagine how many copies they buy in the medium or even large countries. The numbers must be staggering.