When is close enough good enough…
I recently received two emails from very well known brands in Australia. One of them has been lagging behind the market leader for a long time and has spent a lot of money trying to catch up. Both of them were offering some free services /information that I was interested in, so I clicked through to their web site — my first thought was, finally this brand is innovating and has a chance to catchup or leapfrog the competition. The information they were offering looked great and I wanted more. So I tried to login/subscribe to their services. On both occasions the login/subscription service failed with an error like the one below.
server response status is 500
I could progress no further with my subscription and I was lost as a customer/prospect, simply becuase they didn’t test properly and based on the different browsers and devices I tried I would suggest they alienated roughly 60–70% of the market (assuming it worked on IE).
So here is the first important point, none of your customers are going to debug your code for you and neither should you expect them to! Most people won’t bother sending you a note with the error message and a detailed script of what they did so you can solve the problem. Having done a lot of programming in my time I could probably help someone debug the problem with the page, but thats NOT what I was there for!
In both of these cases, better testing would have meant they had me as a customer, someone interested in their services and someone happy to receive further information from them. They missed an opportunity to potentially catchup or leapfrog the competition and they will now struggle to win me back. Even when my frustration at this poor user experience subsides, I will have forgotten about them, received the information from someone else or decided it simply wasn’t important enough after all.
So it got me thinking….. is it ever ok for a site to be “just good enough”? Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn once famously said, “if your not a little embarrassed by your first product then you’ve launched too late”. We could argue the point in reference to products, but I think this is defintely worth considering in relation to your web site. The inference being that you need to get the site to “done” even if it isn’t perfect. But there is one signifcant exception, if my visitors can’t “convert” then the site is not ready for public consumption. “Done” does not include server errors no matter how the content is being consumed!
When I started my first business the web site was built over a weekend, in Wordpress, and launched the following Monday. I wasn’t asking people to sign up to my newsletter, that came in the second iteration which was tested and tested and tested again to be sure that if I managed to get eyeballs on my site, and someone was interested enough in our products that they wanted to hear from me again, that the signup process would be flawless, no matter what browser/os/mobile device they were using to consume the content.
So please, if you are going to create a new online service, and you are going to have a big launch on your site and ask people to subscribe/signup/login, make sure it works. “Good enough” for the rest is probably fine (but not forever, ok!).
