Tag Archives: opt-out

Daily Life, Technology

Shit Web Design

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I’ve only noticed the wording of this recently, and coupled with the stupidity of the design, it really stands out to me now.

Fail.

“ALWAYS clear the tick box”? What, every single time?

So instead of making people tick the box once if they do want to remain signed in, you’re making everyone who doesn’t want to remain logged in, untick it every single time they use it.

Despite this, you only remain half logged in anyway. Even with the box ticked at home, while it remembers my name and shows off everything I’ve looked at recently, every time I try and get to my account details, summary, recently bought items, etc. I have to put the password in again.

You could get around this “keep me signed in” nonsense by using Google Chrome Incognito, or Safari’s private browsing, etc., which then wouldn’t save any of your details or keep you logged into anything, but that’s not the point. It’s poorly thought through design.

I think I started thinking about this because I received a link to this “How to make your shopping cart suck less” thing this morning. While it’s a bit over-ranty in places (I don’t have a problem seeing tiny asterisks), they’re totally right for the most part. Go and check it out if you haven’t seen it already.

Daily Life, Gripes

Opt-in vs opt-out

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It’s that age old question. When you’re designing a website, do you have an opt-in or opt-out form?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I mean that question that says “Please tick here if you do not wish to receive details of new products”. Thats an opt-out, because you have to tick, to opt yourself out of receiving stuff. If it was something you had to tick to say “Yes I am happy to receive special offers”, that’s an opt-in.

Anyway, the long and short of this is that PC World seem to have been unable to make up their mind, and gone for both. As demonstrated by this gem of a form at the end of buying or reserving something:

Brilliant, isn’t it.

Better than that, they seem to have also signed up my relative for some sort of account, from the looks of the email that arrived in her inbox shortly after. All this to reserve one item to pick up in store.

And when we arrived to pick it up, it wasn’t in the reservation area, so they got one off the shelf. Which is the same experience of ring-and-reserve I’ve had now three times in PC World stores. First time they picked one off the shelf. Second time they checked the system, said they had 5, but couldn’t find any. It doesn’t work like Argos’ excellent ring-and-reserve service, that’s for sure.