First of all, Happy New Year!

Now that the formalities are out of the way, I’ll get stuck into the post

Today’s comments are inspired a by a recent experience I had with an online form (of all things!). Being a bit of a game geek, both in the ‘build’ and ‘play’ senses, I constantly read a lot of gaming stuff. One thing that I’m a fairly regular reader of is GamaSutra, as it’s got lots of juicy game development stuff in it - a great read for people such as myself. I finished reading a column on Localizing Brands and Licenses (sorry for the en-US spelling ;)), which was surprisingly interesting (albeit a little bit long) when I noticed a link at the top of the page saying “Game Developer Magazine”. At this point I thought it’d be interesting to see how much it would cost to subscribe so I followed the link (and my nose) through the maze of the web to find myself at the subscription form.

This is where the fun started.

While filling out the form with the required details (name, skin colour, sexual preference, etc) I hit the inevitable “address” section. The first thing that I thought was strange was that it was asking for my address. I was signing up to a digitally distributed magazine, and hence the only address they should have required was an email address. Despite this bit of common sense, I though perhaps they’d need it to verify credit card details, so I went ahead and punched it all in. When I hit the submit button, I was confused. An error came back asking me to specify a “state” for both billing and shipping addresses. This was particularly interesting since there was absolutely no mention of a shipping address on the form, let alone an area in which to enter it. I assumed this was a minor bug in the system, and that if the billing address was fine then the shipping address would simple reflect that of the billing address. So I went back to the billing address section of the form to look for the problem. Being the intuitive fellow that I am, I assumed that since the error mentioned the “state” needed to be specified, I went straight to the “state” field to see what I had entered (in case there was an accidental blunder). The option that I had chosen had been reset to the default, which I assume was done when the page refreshed with the error, so I had to choose an option again. I think a picture of the options is probably the best way of showing you what I was facing, so have a look at this:

As you can see, it’s yet another example of ignorance by a United States web page. This is going to sound a little like a Yankee Bash, and I’m sorry for that, but I am sick to death of so many American web sites like this refused to acknowledge that the rest of the world (other than Canada) exists. You get to choose an American/Canadian state, or “Not Available”, and that’s it. So, since I live in Australia, I had no choice but to choose “Not Available”. I hit submit again and got the same error.

So in a nutshell, it’s too bad if you want a digital subscription to the magazine if you live outside the USA because the payment form just refuses to let you enter your details. Rather than let myself get too narked, I thought I’d get in touch with them and let them know that their form was broken. I took the time to fire up the support page, and send them a stack of information on the scenario. I told them the steps, the order of events, and the information that I had specified, and the resulting error. The comment wasn’t rude, and if anything gave too much information on how to reproduce the problem. After hitting ’send’ I though that I’d hear back within 24 hours and the problem would hopefully be rectified.

Four working days later I got a response, and it was not what I expected. I have actually deleted the email so I can’t paste the content, but I do remember the gist of it, which kinda goes like this:

Mr Reeves,

Thank you for contacting Company X with regards to your problem. You can subscribe to the magazine by sending a cheque to [insert long USA address here] along with your details.

Regards,
The Company X Team

WTF?! No mention of the problem, no mention of a solution, no comments at all about being sorry that the issue even existed. Instead, all I got was a “send via snail mail”. I thought this was unbelievable - yet not surprising. I probably don’t need to tell you that I didn’t bother with their suggestion.

The thing that really baffles me about this is the loss of business. As a business, you don’t want to turn clients away. Providing them with a workaround isn’t the same as fixing the problem - this is just bad quality of service. Not only have they lost me as a possible client, but the problem hasn’t been fixed, which means other people who live outside the USA/Canada are going to have the same issues signing up.

My frustration with the rampant stupidity in the human race increases all the time I’ll finish by quoting something I read in Scott Adam’s blog today:

… it’s getting harder every day to be an optimist.