ESPN Redesigns, Makes Users Feel Stupid
I applaud ESPN for moving to a standards-based design, but I don’t know what they were thinking when they wrote the copy for this upgrade page.
There’s nothing wrong with telling visitors they’re using a technically obsolete browser. However, starting off with “97.8% of our visitors are using a standards-compliant browser. It appears you are not.” is not the way to do it. The average ESPN user doesn’t have a clue what “standards compliance” means probably doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass what it means either.
It would be much more appropriate to start off with a headline like “Browser Upgrade Recommended” and then proceeding to tell users “We noticed that you’re using an older web browser. While your browser may work with the majority of websites, it will not display our redesigned website as intended due to our use of more advanced technologies. For this reason, we recommend that you upgrade to one of the following newer browsers…”
If they had tested that upgrade page with users, they would have realized the technohead buffoons they are.
- 24 Feb 03
- browser, interaction design, redesign, standards, web design, writing
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Comments
Kalsey and Kaufman make the same point today about bad copy writing and what it does to the user (not good things). I learned this lesson two years ago when I took an info architecture…
TrackBack from In My Experience on 25 Feb 03
I have been having a hard time getting customer messaging fixed on the site I work on.
It is either accusatory: “You have tried to access a database that is only available to subscribers!”
Completely unhelpful: “error, try again”
Accusatory and completely unhelpful: “Illegal email address”
Or totally technical: I just did a usability test where the user got the message, “Stored Proc error”, and then, “object moved”. Surprisingly this didn’t seem to clear things up.
Josh on 25 Feb 03
- With the exception of the exclamation point, it’s not that bad. Personally I would go with “The database you are trying to access is only available to subscribers”. A tad friendlier but not much different. It conveys the relevant information (a) what you did wrong and (b) what you need to do right. What would be your idea for a better message?
- Bad
- Bad, “Invalid email address format, the format must be …”
- This is always a touchy one. Let’s assume that this is only in the case of a truly unexpected critical/fatal error. The skill of the programmer is a big factor in defining what is unexpected, but let’s also assume there is a measure of comptetence there. The programmer didn’t expect it, so he can’t really add custom messaging. The choices are to print out “Error” or print the actual error that came from the database/remote server/API/etc. The second is scary, but it gives a clear definition of the problem that can be used by support reps, knowledge bases, etc to quickly find the solution. In short, things have gotten really out of hand and the user’s ability to help identify the problem now is now more important (and more valuable to the user) than the user’s desire to understand the problem.
Eric on 26 Feb 03
“I have been having a hard time getting customer messaging fixed on the site I work on.”
The difficulty wasn’t in coming up with solutions or understanding the problems.
I was referring to the difficulty in getting problems like that prioritized even when they are causing demonstrable problems. I was also taking a cheap shot at engineers writing messages ;)
josh on 2 Mar 03