Poor Usability Means You Don't Get My Credit Card Information

[Turing_Machine]

I guess I'm not seeing the usability problems here. It isn't pretty, certainly, but if I were considering the service I'd want to know how much it costs (starts at $1.49/month), what kind of limits it might have in terms of number of users (they say that the free trial lets you have up to 5,000, which is some indication it's not going to fall over with just a few), and what my support options are (I see "Knowledge Base" and "FAQ" right there in the sidebar). All that information is clearly visible on the front page of the site.

They aren't operating a consumer-oriented service. They're operating a back-end utility -- and in this case one that sells a product (RSS feeds) with all the "design" intentionally stripped off!

Supposedly the reason the Google home page is the way it is is that Page and Brin only knew enough HTML to make a white page with a text input box. Where are all their competitors now? :-)

[DanBC]

She makes a great point. Maybe, just maybe, things would get better if enough people didn't pay money to sites with awful usability.

But then I see how wildly successful Amazon is and I realise that I'm just dreaming.

[rachelbaker]

Thanks Dan!

Amazon is far from perfect, but they are the Walmart of the web. Small players need to be better, and hopefully know that Amazon.com is not the standard for which they should aim.

[talmai]

I loved the comment someone left behind: "If you want to present (yourself) as a usability expert, in order to (b)e taken seriously you'll need to avoid taking up 25% of my iPhone's screen with a header that follows my scrolling."