Jun 29 2007
The Perils of Language, or How Seagate Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bad Design
Take a look at the website for Seagate:
http://www.seagate.com/freeagent/
Beside the garish and gloriously ghastly flash animation (and painful music) on the homepage, there is a really big (and really simple) usability gaffe. Can you spot it?
Read on…
It’s the link for support called “help.” Why is it called help? If you visit that site, you’ll look for “support” for about 30 seconds until you finally see “help” and wonder, could it be there? You will reluctantly put your mouse over the link to investigate and if you are lucky, you will see and click “support.”
You can just tell when a website was designed for the board room and not the user.
Impact to visitors: substantial
Cost to repair: $37.50 (15 minutes of time at $150/hr)
Sometimes substantial usability gaffes that can really damage your business are really very simple problems to solve.