Polling Point's Poor User Experience

I'm not usually the kind of person that stops to fill out online surveys. Most of the time, I find myself hassled by the unethical way most survey sites offer free drawings in exchange for the right to spam me and sell my email address to the highest bidder. On occasion, though, I break my own rules and do complete surveys. In this case, I got exactly what I expected... something to write about.

This survey, which was conducted by PollingPoint.com, was a simple, straightforward survey. It consisted of three pages of questions about entertainment, politics, religion, etc. It was easy, and it took me two minutes. Once the survey was complete, Polling Point asked for my contact information so that they could send me more poll invitations. Here's the screen:

On the surface, this page is pretty straightforward. However, I have a couple of problems with it. Keep in mind that I try to approach every screen I see like a casual browser, not the developer and frequent web user that I am:

1. What do the asterisks (*) next to the name and email fields mean? I suppose they could mean that those three fields are required, but they aren’t; I can navigate away from this page without filling out anything. But even if they were required, the only web convention for denoting required fields they seem follow is the presence of the asterisk. What they didn’t do was make the asterisk red, place it before the field and place a note at the top of the page communicating as much. But since none of the information on this page is required, I can only assume that the asterisks mean that I should fill out those three fields if I’m going to fill out anything. This is probably not the best way to communicate that information. Even still, since there is nothing on the page to map the asterisks to their purpose, I'm only making an assumption and I could be totally off.

2. I need to be reassured that you’re not going to pimp out my information before I fill out the form. This is nit-picky, I know, but it makes a difference in conversion. Most people are going to miss that note because it’s jammed between the form and the navigation buttons. In addition, the first sentence can be emphasized a bit more. That’s the reassurance the user wants to hear.

But alas, I am not interested in receiving invitations to complete surveys, and since nothing appears to be required, I click the “Next Page” button. Here is the result:

Two thoughts on this page:

1. Never, ever keep a user from navigating away from a page with NO required information. To a casual user, no good can come of this and only confusion will result. “Why am I seeing the same page again, and with lots of red text?” they will ask as close their browser. I should never see red on a page where nothing is wrong and nothing is required. A better solution would be to allow me an opportunity to change my mind and return to this form on a future page.

2. “You may continue to skip entry of this information.” That’s exactly what I was trying to do, isn’t it? So what do I do now? If I click “Next Page” again, will it give me the same message or let me go? This message, which is unclear and grammatically incorrect, isn’t really helping me and I don’t even know exactly what to do until I click “Next Page” again and it actually works. This is not a difficult fix, but changing the text to read “Click ‘Next Page’ to skip entry of this information” can make a big difference.

After clearing the land mines, I am presented with the last form, which, aside from trying to get me to enter a drawing for an iPod mini, actually employs a good method for increasing conversion:



The box to the right, which gives me an opportunity to go back and complete the last form, is the right way to go about this process. Unfortunately, I’ve already gotten a bad taste from being unable to leave the form behind and I won’t be changing my mind this time.

The point of bringing up PollingPoint.com is to illustrate that there is more to a satisfying user experience than slick and simple interfaces. PollingPoint had those, to be sure. But a user will quickly forget about the look of something if they’re having trouble completing a task.

I think it's time I get back to the "Design for Context" series now, so I'll return in my next post with "Ideas vs. Implementation" as promised.