Could terrible websites be a business opportunity?
Monday, December 3rd, 2007In about 13 years of using the net, today I wrote my first web site feedback.
RS Electronics is the only major electronics distributor to ship parts from locations in Japan, which means shipping is cheap and quick. They have a good selection of parts, prices which are sometimes reasonable, and ship very promptly.
And yet, I will try to source a part using any other means available before going to their site, inexplicably named rswww.co.jp and separate from the more reasonable rs-components.jp. Why? Because using rswww is almost physically painful.
I wasted so much time this weekend fighting with their horrible UI that today I actually took the time to fill out their feedback form. I tried to be polite.
I mostly expressed my frustration with one feature of their site, the “session timeout.” Sessions time out after 20 mins… doesn’t sound so bad, right? But, you don’t have to be logged in to have a session exist and inexplicably time out. If I click on “electronic parts,” go away for 20 min, then click on “LEDs” I would see a page saying that either the session timed out or the link is bad. And from there you can only go to the top. Huh? Knowing this, a clever person would try to avoid the extra time-out page and just click to go back to the top. Oh no. Trying to go to the top of the site gives you the timeout page.
So I wrote my first site feedback. I was polite. And when I click send… session timeout.
Which brings me to my point: could there be a business in creating a well-designed “wrapper” site to shield users from terrible UI design? I want one for RS. And my bank site. And credit card site. Hmmm….