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"As an experiment, I went through a list of holiday weekend sales, and opened all the sites. They all — all, 100% — interrupted my attempt to give them some mon
by jerf 4y ago
"As an experiment, I went through a list of holiday weekend sales, and opened all the sites. They all — all, 100% — interrupted my attempt to give them some money."
This is a good touchstone to use for "you've overoptimized your site, tone it back". I am also taken aback every time I'm on a site, I've got something in my shopping cart, I'm headed for the "check out" button, or I'm even on the checkout page, and some stupid interstitial pops up. Dude, I'm trying to enter my credit card information! Back off! Especially stupid for a "sign up for our newsletter" popup; we all know that unclicking the "yes, we can email you every 17 seconds from now until the heat death of the universe with valuable offers from 'our affiliates' which we define as 'anyone we share a species with'!" box on the checkout form is mandatory, and if we don't see it immediately we'd best go hunting for it. You've already default populating the checkbox to "yes" on this very screen, get out of the way!
Less unbelievably stupid, but related, is when I'm examining product X and just after I scroll down a bit to read more you pop up something related to... well... anything other than product X! I'm signalling interest in product X as hard as I can, and you've AB tested that this is a great time to jangle your keys over there instead? Your AB testing is stupid and can't possibly fail to be some stupid statistical fluke or other terrible error. What fisherman goes out on his boat, hooks a fish, and then rushes to throw another completely different lure out to the hooked fish and get them on that hook instead? This is another good touchstone for being "overoptimized".
- enlyth 4y agoSpeaking of 'sign up to our newsletter', one of the latest dark patterns I've found that astounded me was adding a checkbox to the login form [0], where you'd normally expect the 'remember me' checkbox to be. You almost click it out of muscle memory if you don't read what it says. [0] https://i.postimg.cc/HW89hs7r/Screenshot-2022-07-12-145957.png https://i.postimg.cc/HW89hs7r/Screenshot-2022-07-12-145957.p...
- cardamomo 4y agoYes! I just noticed this for the first time yesterday and thought, "I hope this isn't another terrible trend in dark patterns."
- aroccoli 4y agoYeah, I booked a flight on WizzAir two days ago, and this felt like a low blow even from WizzAir.
- _puk 4y agoPredicting the flight will be cancelled in 3.. 2.. 1.. But then the newsletter will haunt you for far far longer.. Not a burnt WizzAir customer at all! /s
- enlyth 4y agoHappened to my dad on Sunday, and the only replacement flight they would offer is for this Friday, what a complete joke air travel is in 2022.
- nebusoft 4y agoI mean you're complaining about an ultra-low cost airline. why would you expect it to have a good customer experience?
- enlyth 4y agoYes I am. They also overbooked seven people on that flight, delayed it for hours, and then completely cancelled. There were people in wheelchairs left stranded at the airport after waiting there all day. This is just plain incompetence.
- bombcar 4y ago"Remember me in your newsletter list" is the next one. Send me money!
- Akronymus 4y agoThats one of the things I REALLY dislike about GoG lately. It tries really hard to bait you into signing up for the newsletter when buying stuff.
- eloisius 4y agoEmail marketing in general blows my mind. Marketers typically have absolutely no respect for consent, and the costs are completely borne by the recipient. The whole industry depends on dark patterns, shady list sharing, and scraping your email to add it to their lists despite you having no relationship with them. I know it's not simple, and it's just my frustration speaking, but I don't understand how my mail host can't ban all Mailchimp et al IPs for me, or implement some standard such that it costs them a penny to send me an email.
- b112 4y agoI'm not a big fan of ipv6, but fan or not, I bet if all spammy mailchimp type provider IP ranges were confiscated and freed, we'd be in ipv4 land for another 20 years. And as a second thought, the way China amd Russia are going, maybe we should just reclaim all their ipv4 addresses, and just give each country 1 IP, they can proxy through it on their end.
- quickthrower2 4y agoThen say goodbye to the internet and hello to a mesh of country-specific networks. Finally, true decentralisation!
- b112 4y ago? That's my point, as this is China already, and Russia is not far behind.
- jamiek88 4y agoWe already have that. It’s just we are in denial as a society about it. Globalization is over. The post Berlin wall fall consensus undermined and ruined. The last to realize, loses.
- account42 4y agoThe quickest way to achieve defeat is to convince yourself that you have already lost.
- SoftTalker 4y agoI never check "remember me" so maybe that's good for me?
- dwighttk 4y agoHeh. I’ve stopped clicking remember me boxes because they never work.
- CodesInChaos 4y agoatlassian does this as well: https://i.postimg.cc/zfwbG5Ft/atlassian-login.png https://i.postimg.cc/zfwbG5Ft/atlassian-login.png
- geysersam 4y agoI knew Atlassian hates their users. But that much??
- Jenk 4y ago> I'm signalling interest in product X as hard as I can, and you've AB tested that this is a great time to jangle your keys over there instead? If I may... I have seen data from a big retailer that shows any user that doesn't immediately purchase an item, is actually not that interested in the product on the screen. If a customer is going to buy something, they will do it promptly. Anyone else is just browsing. YMMV, grain of salt, context dependent, etc, etc.
- jerf 4y agoIn this case, what I'm referring to is: 1. Clicked on page. 2. Took maybe 10 seconds to take in what is "above the fold". 3. Scrolled down to see what else there is. 4. BAM! Popup triggered by scrolling down. While I understand what you're getting at, they do not yet have the info to know that I'm browsing or whatever. They were so excited about their stupid popup that they didn't even get that far. I will say, generally, when I'm to the point that I'm entering credit card info, I've put up with it, but I have been chased off of sites by this use case before. Especially if that popup also crosses with some other popup and now I'm chasing down the tiny little 6pt light-grey-on-white little "x"s to click away the popups in the right order. Actually, let me add that to my touchstone list. OF COURSE hiding the dismissal icon for the popup increases "engagement" with the popup. You don't even need to run a test for that, because what other result could it have? "We shrank the close icon, moved it to the lower right corner where nobody expects it, and made sure to kill the constrast even harder, and customers dismissed it 2.5 seconds more quickly on average"? Of course that's not possible. But... that's the wrong question! And AB testing is really good at answering the question you're asking, it has no mechanism in and of itself to see whether you're asking the right question. If you're getting down to this you've overoptimized.
- sharemywin 4y agoMost people are just browsing so it's optimizing for that when it should be optimizing for sales
- CSMastermind 4y agoRecently I got an account on a developer tool (Checkly) because the company I joined uses it. I then got 5 different emails from them in a 48 hour period. Like I'm sure many users sign up then drop out of your funnel but I'm part of an organization that's a paying customer. I'm already going to use your stuff. What possible business benefit could there be to you spamming me? If anything you're risking the inverse - it made me want to migrate away from the tool.
- mattgreenrocks 4y agoThe 'cost' of email is borne by the recipient, mostly.
- chairmanwow1 4y agoSounds like they are optimizing for a KPI on time to full integration. Someone else paid for it, now they want to make sure that you are actually using it. Still absurd, but I know this is a problem friends of mine have had.
- bombcar 4y agoThe "here's how to use the product you paid for" emails that trickle out over a few weeks or a month is vastly different than "throw you into every single marketing email bucket we have" but companies seem to lean toward the latter.
- tnolet 4y agoHey CSMastermind, I'm founder at Checkly and I got a ping we were mentioned. We do send out some "getting started" messages on autopilot. We also did a product launch Thursday and then our regular changelog on Monday. That probably was overwhelming. If you could email me on tim -at- checklyhq -dot- com I will track down if we hit the the spam cannon too hard.
- wccrawford 4y agoI don't use your tool and I'm unrelated to CSMastermind, but I can tell you that you absolutely hit the "spam cannon" too hard. 5 messages in 48 hours? That's absolutely ridiculous. They could all have been 1 message if it was important that they get that info, and it could have been 0 messages if it wasn't.
- naravara 4y agoHonestly instead of a cookie law I wish GDPR has imposed a rule that required all those stupid interstitial pop-ups to conform to a standard that could be easily blocked by the browser. I mean they are asking for emails, which is a massive and totally unnecessary proliferation of personally identifiable information. I hate them so much. It makes it feel like so much more of a chore to try to do research or look for things online. I'd honestly prefer 56k page-load speeds if the pages were free of this garbage.
- jdlshore 4y agoPet peeve: GDPR is not the cookie law, and is fact a very sensible collection of restrictions on how companies can collect and process personal data. The annoying banners you see are against the spirit of the GDPR, and quite possibly against the letter of it, too.
- EGreg 4y agoMaybe your money is no longer the most important thing for them at that moment? Given that you’ll probably proceed with the purchase anyway, they could be making more overall from the crowd which also signs up for updates.
- nemo44x 4y agoA lot of this happens because different managers have different metrics/KPIs they are optimizing around and they all find "good places" to do things to help meet their goals. The secondary effects aren't considered. One managers quest for outperforming their goals comes at the expense of another managers goals.
- d23 4y agoThere was a point a few years ago where you could not see a single piece of user-generated content above the fold on the reddit home page. A bunch of teams had jockeyed for having their little carousels and banners put on top, and of course, metrics were always cited. I left a screenshot in slack and it ended up causing a couple of teams to have to roll back their widgets, but it always baffled me that we were able to focus so much on the individual trees of metric optimization that we would miss the forest to that extent.
- nemo44x 4y ago> but it always baffled me that we were able to focus so much on the individual trees of metric optimization that we would miss the forest to that extent Always look to the decision maker's incentives and you'll almost always discover why things are the way they are. And often, to your point, there's an aspect of tunnel vision associated with it because considering the bigger picture is difficult as a company grows and becomes more complex and creates friction in achieving goals. Ultimately, this is the purpose of senior leadership. But the Peter Principal really begins to kick in at that level and the truth is, many senior leaders are in over their head and are unable to materialize the broader strategy and understand how their various units are affecting it. So we end up with crappy products.
- bluGill 4y agoThe best metric is the end of year bonus, tided to yearly total company financial results, but that only gets measured once per year. I can measure many things on every transaction, but how they in total work out to my end of year bonus and paycheck are much harder to see. Of course if my bonus is some small KPI I can optimize that at the expense of overall performance.
- legalcorrection 4y agoIndeed, quantitative data without qualitative understanding is useless. You can't understand data without understanding mechanisms, because there's an infinite number of possible confounding factors that you can only dismiss through your qualitative understanding of the dynamic you are measuring.
- tshaddox 4y agoThe thing is, you haven’t really shown that these sites aren’t successfully optimizing for conversions. Couldn’t it very well be the case that UI which annoys some high-intent users by interrupting them or adding steps to the checkout process also increases overall conversions?
- jl6 4y agoTrue, A could be “annoy users” and B could be “don’t annoy users”, and A could perform better overall, but in this framework you might be missing C which is “annoy users except those already deep in the funnel”.
- tshaddox 4y agoMy point is more that there can be two groups of users with mutually exclusive desires, and it can be practical to choose to satisfy one group over the other based on your particular goals. There's not always some monotonically increasing function where you can over time satisfy a higher and higher portion of your users.
- oxfordmale 4y agoI love to sign-up to news letters and get a discount. Of course I am giving you my spam account I set up for this exact purpose.
- joe_the_user 4y agoLet me propose a different possibility. Suppose the site isn't concerned about the sale very much at all? Suppose the thing that the site uses to reel people in, is a good deal that isn't very profitable to the site but what the site then tries to sell is a very profitable near-scam/ripoff. Scaring off half the ordinary customers becomes worth it to get even 10% of the customers buying the scam. What seems like "poor optimization" can easily optimization for something and could be seen as "the scammification of the web".
- bsuvc 4y agoExactly this. Many here are focusing on a single interaction. While the outcome of that single interaction is negative to the company, the aggregate outcome must be positive somehow, perhaps in the way you said, but it doesn't even have to be a scam or ripoff. Some products just have a higher margin and/or customer LTV. As an individual, it is annoying, but the company is focusing only on the macro effect when it does something like this.
- tracerbulletx 4y agoI would really warn you against thinking your intuitions are going to be a good sign for whether or not something is a good retail decision.
- m463 4y agoAmazon does this in a horrible way. 1) I open a product in a tab. I click "add to cart" and a "related products" sidebar slides in. I close the tab in annoyance. However, some items exhibit a similar pattern, EXCEPT... 2) I open a product in a tab. I click "add to cart" and a stupid extended warranty sidebar slides in. I close the tab in annoyance. The difference? Item #1 gets added to my cart Item #2 doesn't make it to the shopping cart. Amazon just silently deleted my purchase. I actually don't know when it dawned on me that this happened, but amazon lost money on me because I didn't buy certain things.
- lifeplusplus 4y agoWhat you describe could actually be an artifact of "flaw of averages" (an article was posted here just few days ago, TLDR: air force discovered that nobody fit the body dimensions of an average pilot and therefore created adjustable seats for jets). If promotion banners are just segmented to general millions of people then that's exactly what will happen. But not sure if better segmenting is even possible with data available.