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Previous: Neutrogena online survey | Main | Next: Elevator call button
April 26, 2005 12:01 AM
Broken: Business Week's internationalization
Reuven Lerner writes:
I was recently living and working in Israel. About four years ago, I went to BusinessWeek's Web site and registered in order to gain access to its content.
Unfortunately, BusinessWeek didn't just want to get my name and e-mail address; they wanted to get all of my contact information. One of the mandatory fields in their registration form asked for the state in which I live, in a text field (rather than a pull-down list).
Hoping that some human would read the addresses that were entered, I used the limited space to indicate that Israel doesn't have any subdivisions such as states or provinces.
Little did I know that my registration information would be handled by a computer, and that it would be used to send me (paper) solicitations to subscribe to BusinessWeek.
Every six months or so, I am asked if I want to subscribe to the magazine. As you can see from the scanned form that I have enclosed, my little address correction from oh-so-many years ago has remained undetected in their computer system.
A very common case of bad design. The country I live in has provinces, but we never specify them in addresses.
People who do forms for such things should make sure the state/province input is not required for non-us/canadian addresses or at least have a "N/A" or "Non-US" option in the selection field if it is a dropdown list.
When I get to an intrusive form that insists it has to have an address for me I just write "you don't need this." All sorts of mail may be addressed to me but at least I don't actually get any of it.
Hee! On one of the forms I recently filled up (don't remember who for), they had a "Beyond Limits" option for state if you lived outside the US.
I had address labels written "Cyberjaya, Selangor, Beyond Limits". XD
Does it come with a pre-paid envelope to return the subscription in? If so, have fun posting all your junk mail to them.
Just as bad: registration forms on web sites (newspapers, for instance) that not only have a 'state' field with no 'other' option, but absolutely require you to have a five-digit postal code.
See my own rant on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's (intrusive) registration form here:
That is too funny. One time, my brother was online, ordering financial information from a company. At this time, he was in University, and thus was unemployed. The web site would not let him request the financial info unless he filled out all of the fields (Job title, company...) so he filled them out randomly. A week later the information came, and this is what was on the label:
Dr. Jayson XXXXX
Director of Lesbian Research
Lesbian Company of Canada
123 Street, Quebec Canada
xxx xxx
The person who delivered the mail must have gotten a huge laugh out of that label!
What's sad is many companies will not ship to PO Boxes. I once signed up for a free item which was very small and would easily fit in a PO Box, but when I entered that in the address the web page said they don't deliver to PO Boxes. I got around that by sending it to P-O Box, and it arrived a week later.
I just noticed something even more interesting-- the phone number it says to contact for assistance on the BusinessWeek subscription is a UK number! That makes the whole state/province thing seem especially odd...
What's broken is web sites that a) make you register first, and b) think people will actually enter legit information. (Well, I guess one person in Israel has...)
http://www.bugmenot.com/ for mandatory registration pages.
'Nuff said.
Ok, but I'm gonna say it anyway, darn it: I HATE those stupid "to help us serve you better" web forms you're supposed to register on to see online content. You WERE serving me better when I could go directly to the friggin' article without giving you enough personal information to open a bank account and obtain my personal medical history, thank you very much.
Harumph.
It's okay, I'm done now.....
Ok, this is a bit unrelated, but I just have to ask... Why does the NYTimes require registration for full text articles, yet recommend the use of www.bugmenot.com? There's a link to the relevant article at the bottom of the bugmenot main page. I won't include the URL, because it's way too long.
A problem I've had is that many of Bugmenot's accounts don't work. I wonder if that's because some evil person decided to enter nonexistent accounts.
anitsirK,
If a URL is long, you can always use some free web-service that does link shortening (for example http://www.makeashorterlink.com or http://tinyurl.com and such). And the aforementioned NYT article link becomes http://tinyurl.com/9u2sb
You can report the accounts as not working on Bugmenot. I use the bugmenot extension (http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/02/07/bugmenot/) for Firefox (www.getfirefox.com) and it works great.
Erich said: You WERE serving me better when I could go directly to the friggin' article without giving you enough personal information to open a bank account and obtain my personal medical history, thank you very much.
Right! Exactly! Right on!
The information is to serve THEM better, of course, not us, and they ought to come right out and say "We want this information so we can charge more money for our online ads. Please help us out by providing it".
If the sites that required registration were upfront about why they want the info, they might get better info.
I wonder how many people registered at the NY Times site live in Albania. That's the first country in the drop-down list.
If you register at the NY Times, and use something like none@jklmnop.com for your e-mail address, and tell it to remember you, then you can go directly to the articles from links such as www.msn.com or my.msn.com without having to see the reg page.
There's sanity behind the no PO boxes rule and the mere fact that yours worked doesn't mean it always will.
PO boxes can only be reached by postal mail. Package delivery serivces can't send to them. Thus if the company always ships by UPS they can't allow PO box addresses. Some companies ship by various methods depending on what's cheaper for that package.
Incidently, size isn't a problem. I've gotten oversize stuff in a PO box before. They handle it the same way they handle packages with the cluster box up the street--if you get something too big you find a key instead of the item. The key will open another box at which point you can't remove the key but you can get your item out.
You could have written "Central District" in the state/province box, as Modi'in is in the Central District.
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Previous: Neutrogena online survey | Main | Next: Elevator call button
I've worked in a printing house for a few hours and I would see stuff like that go by all the time. Quite sad but entertaining.
Posted by: jeff at April 26, 2005 12:49 AM