The site is going to drop a cookie and allow me to bypass the login form the next time I visit the site. Wonderful. The only problem is that the cookie only lasts a very short period of time (24-hours in this case), making it essentially useless. Name and shame: LeadImpact.
You don’t need it, no one is going to fill it in, so why ask? It’s just a waste of space. The perception of the forms length has a bearing on the conversion rate, so there’s a darn good business reason for to get rid of it. Name and shame: GermanWings.
Reset buttons are almost always completely unnecessary. They certainly should never be places on the right hand side of the form footer or have the same visual focus.
It’s notoriously difficult to understand what is and isn’t the UK , but it’s usually a given that when we’re asked to select our nationality online, we’d scroll down the list looking for the United Kindgom. Frustratingly, some sites insist that we should be selecting England, Britain, or Great Britain. Neglecting which is more correct, the web would be more pleasant if sites were just more consistent.
Today’s guilty site was my University’s accommodation booking form. Even more shameful given that it’s British, or is that English? Confusing!
As a former employee, I’m somewhat partial of Commission Junction. But I get annoyed when companies decide to clean up their database by pruning inactive accounts.
Let’s be real; there’s no real cost of dormant accounts (data storage, administrative overhead, or otherwise) but it does cause a real pain for users. The risk is that I’ve lost all my historic data and can no longer use my main email address.
As a webmaster, I understand spam is a real bugger. But sometimes the use of a CAPTCHA seems quite unnecessary.
eBay’s crime is that even through I’ve logged in with my password, have a solid reputation on the site and sent hundreds of clean messages, they still want me to sign a CAPTCHA on every outbound message.
Perhaps I’m being naive, but I’m pretty sure Gmail would be crap if you had to sign a CAPTCHA every time you sent an email – so I’m confident there are other solutions to their spam woes.