How to Piss Off Your Users

Last year, when we finished building They’re Beautiful! we started thinking about what to build next. I don’t know how many software projects are started out of anger, but Invitastic was definitely one of them. We all shared a deep dislike for eVite. And the focusing moment for us was the e-mail reminder eVite sends you right before the event that neglects to include all the details (thereby forcing you to go to their site and generate another pageview for IAC). Running a profitable software/web business is super difficult and we don’t claim to be experts by any stretch of the imagination. But, when a company does something so obviously not in the best interest of its customer you can’t help but wonder how long this company will last. The answer may be “forever”. After all, Invitastic and countless other invite competitors have been around for some time and eVite continues to own the market.

That said, while one moment of anger and frustration may not be the shove that sends users fleeing en masse, it does make it easier for them to leave when the right alternative comes along. What is a company saying to its users when they do stuff like that? I think it goes something like this: “We know that this ‘feature’ makes your life harder, but we couldn’t think of a way to get you to spend more time on our site that was actually something you wanted to do so we’ve had to resort to cynical stuff like this.”

A couple of days ago I needed to look something up on my bank’s website — an old transaction. I found the right spot in the UI and then was told that in order to access the information (that was sitting right there in their database) I had to choose not to receive paper statements anymore. It wasn’t that they gave me the option — there was no choice. “You want the info? Cancel your paper statement.” In truth, that’s something I’ve been meaning to do anyway. Why have the clutter, and it must be better for the planet to cancel the paper statements. But I still wasn’t quite ready to pull the trigger. I understand the bank giving me the option of killing paper statements. I even understand them promoting that option aggressively as in addition to saving the planet, it saves them tons of money. But to force me to make that tradeoff when I wasn’t quite ready was stupid. All it did was piss me off. I didn’t cancel the paper statements because I wasn’t ready to. And I wasn’t going to be forced into it by their cynical choice of not letting me have the info I need — that they had and cost them essentially zero to give me — until I acquiesced to their cost-cutting measure.

This is a tough balance I know. So much of software is decisions about how to influence user choice. And often we justify pushing users to make certain decisions because we believe our way is “better” for them. And often it is. But you’ve got to give people choices. I’d even feel ok about my bank eliminating paper statements altogether for everyone all at once. But it really made me feel like my bank was filled with jerks as they decided to hold me hostage when I really needed their help.

The most contemporary (and most web 2.0-ish) example of this type of thinking is the MLM-like scam that is most facebook apps. (Complaining about Facebook app spam is certainly not a new theme.) It’s not that these apps are without value. Some of them are distractions, some are fun, some are novel, and some are dumb. The real offensive aspect of many of these apps is their up front and never-ending demands for more users in order to reveal their functionality. I won’t contribute to the debate on what all those users are worth as it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this post. After all, the key thing is that the app creators think that having tons of users is important to the value of their business. And for many of them they will stop at no end to crank up those numbers.

The other day, for some reason I decided to respond to one of the notifications I got that someone had posted something for me to read (or sneezed at me, or something… I’m not entirely sure). The app asked me to “forward” the post in order to read it. Believe it or not, I didn’t really understand what that meant. Mostly when people post messages for me I don’t think about forwarding them to everyone. After all, the message is ostensibly for me. Before I realized the implications I had spammed all my friends with this thing. And after tricking me into performing this little soul compromising activity the app never did show me the message I wanted to see.

There are now countless apps on facebook that on almost every interaction greet you with a big dialog asking you to invite all your friends to use the app. Sometimes they force you to do it before you can continue. Sometimes they offer some additional value if you spam your friends. And sometimes they just make the “skip” button really small. Scrabulous managed to get tons of users on facebook without doing any of this. Are they wizards? Evil geniuses? (Copyright infringers?) They actually offered something of value that friends could do together. And it worked. (Whether it was theirs to offer is another discussion altogether.)

I understand that forcing users to spam their friends is a neat way to get lots of people signed up for an app. However, even putting aside the actual value of people who joined your app through confusion or social engineering, is this really the tone you want to set with your audience? Is this really the message you want to send about what kind of company you are?

5 Comments »