13 ms·

I don't want to fill out your contact form

324 points by domdomegg 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dazc 2y ago
On the other side, a typical contact form message reads something like... 'Of course I have read the FAQs but just wanted to ask the exact same question which happens to be the very first FAQ on the list... Also, publishing an email address seldom works out well.
- hnbad 2y ago
  Sure but that message would be no worse if sent by email instead of contact form. And he does address the "risk" of publishing an email address. I can second that I've seen more spam from WordPress forms than published email addresses.
notatoad 2y ago
And I don’t want to read your email…
delish 2y ago
>I don't want to fill out your contact form Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be _contacted_ by you. It's a cost to them. The median "contact us for a sales quote" form is clearer and has less friction than the median "file a complaint / ask a question" form. One reason not in the article people might use forms instead of email is the "set and setting" of being a guest on a website and filling out their form. When in "your" email inbox as opposed to on "someone else's" site, you may conduct yourself differently. An example of this is the sometimes-onerous Github issue template questions. I'm not arguing they're not necessary, but they do two things: mandate required information and _imply_ that you are a guest and you must hold yourself to someone else's communication norms.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  > Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be _contacted_ by you. For a company to make a sale, there needs to be a way for the client to contact them, a way to make a purchase. Having crap contact forms makes as much sense as having restaurant waiters spit clients in the face to greet them. With the world we're living in that might become the norm in a few years or months.
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    I've worked for client who spend a lot of money optimizing form fill-out rates down to the nth degree. I once worked on a mortgage form. It had a pic of a call center person next to it. I persuaded my boss to try a pic of a dog with a tie, glasses and headset I found instead. It increased the conversion rate by 17%. People are weird.
    - ycombinator_acc 2y ago
      Correlation is not causation.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > but they do two things: mandate required information and _imply_ that you are a guest and you must hold yourself to someone else's communication norms. To be honest, tools like this do quite a good job of filtering out people who want you to bend over backward for them. If someone is so stubborn that they refuse to take a couple minutes to fill out someone’s form, they’re likely to be very demanding and uncooperative with every future engagement. Of course, these people never see themselves as such.
amluto 2y ago
> Hook up a shared mailbox, collaborative inbox, or one of the many off-the-shelf customer service solutions like Zendesk, Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, Zammad, osTicket, or FreeScout to your email. This list is missing the classic, and still excellent, Request Tracker. https://bestpractical.com/request-tracker https://bestpractical.com/request-tracker https://github.com/bestpractical/rt https://github.com/bestpractical/rt (I have no affiliation, and I’ve only ever interacted with it from the request-submitting side. But it’s always been straightforward and rock-solid, and it’s worth something that the same system has worked continuously for apparently 20 years. And it’s flexible enough that I once worked with a small institution that wired up Request Tracker for submitting jobs to a large-format printer.)
- dijit 2y ago
  I used it at one company, that company switched to Jira. I miss RT, it was ugly but good.
- domdomegg 2y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation, will add!
- Repulsion9513 2y ago
  It's funny how easy it is for something to just keep working when they aren't badly combining it with other services they purchased (hi ZenDesk, I still can't delete users in it because that's part of "Support" which we don't use, but I can create users just fine because that's still part of "Chat").
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Last time I worked with RT, to do anything custom you had to script it in perl. That's a language that hasn't been popular for a couple of decades (yes I know it's still running a lot of stuff, but try to hire a Perl dev in 2024), good luck. Maybe a case where AI could help. But not sure even AI knows about RT "scriptlets"
npilk 2y ago
> You might want to use a contact form to collect structured data, so it saves you time processing requests. For example, making sure the customer provides the right identifiers for you to find them on your systems quickly, or automatically assigning queries to the right teams. As the author alludes to, I think collecting structured data from unstructured input (e.g. inbound support emails) is a very promising real-world use case for LLMs. The goal would be to make it as easy as possible for users to send you information, and then use AI to parse what you need out of it. This would lead to less frustrated users and even increased response rates (for reasons the author mentions). I've been playing around with this idea at https://www.semiform.ai https://www.semiform.ai for anyone interested.
- domdomegg 2y ago
  This does seem pretty cool. I have not spent too long looking at this but a few bits of initial feedback: 1. Appreciation for an informative site: I like that your website actually explains what your product does in simple terms. So many marketing sites are impossible to parse, so it's cool that this one gets to the point quickly. Bonus points for having a live demo without a sign up. 2. Dealing with uncertainty / edge cases: One worry I'd have is that this might miss things that are relevant, or doesn't capture uncertainty well. I'd probably want a default of a 'flag for a human because this doesn't fit in the boxes well' marker by default on all forms. For example, if someone responds to the conference example with 'Sure, I'll be there on Monday and I wear a size M. Also I am in a wheelchair so will need the venue to be accessible - please let me know if it's not.', I'd want to make sure this gets flagged rather than the automated system ignoring the last part (especially as people might expect humans to read the response to an email).
dewey 2y ago
The rant should be: „Don’t break your contact form“, forms that are done well are good for both sides. Better triage on the receiver end, quicker response for the sender.
YetAnotherNick 2y ago
The biggest complaint of the author seems to be needing to give out his data to fill a form. This is very much intentional. In my company, almost all of the contact form submissions tried to sell us something, sometimes in very deceiving way(e.g. I found something broken in your front page which leads to poor search engine ranking, and I can help fix it), if not outright spam.
- parpfish 2y ago
  But this is so frustrating when you need to contact a company and you don’t have the info they want. A while back we wanted to have the physical landlines from the phone company removed from our house. I found the company, but every contact form asked for my account number. If I didn’t provide one, Id get redirected to their sales team because obviously I was trying to create a new account. I don’t remember how I got it fixed other than a lot of time on hold.
  - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    Support and contact are two different things. Companies shouldn't have existing customer to fill the generic contact us form.
mrbluecoat 2y ago
> There are some organisations that intentionally want their form to be difficult to complete - perhaps it’s a regulatory requirement that you don’t really want to comply with. If you’re doing this, you should probably feel bad. Bad contact forms I encounter usually fall into this category.
chrismorgan 2y ago
> In theory, your customer might be using an email provider that doesn’t support encryption - which could lead them to sending something to you insecurely and putting them at risk. I think most organisations can accept this risk given how rare this is, given that this is on the customer’s end. I think we’ve reached the stage where major providers are rejecting messages over cleartext, right? Requiring either explicit TLS or STARTTLS?
- lambdaxyzw 2y ago
  I seriously doubt it. I've tried to set up my (tiny) company email TLS-only, and had to backtrack two days later when two different customers complained that their emails were bounced. One of them was representing a major national bank. I've lost the last bit of hope for e-mail I had.
nottorp 2y ago
Contact forms are dead. These days you type some text in a box and a LLM gives you a few answers that are totally unrelated to your problem. If you want to contact support, you have to threaten to cancel. If they even care about that.
- xingped 2y ago
  So far I've somehow only run across one LLM support chatbot. And it was actually mostly helpful. Not 100% but decent enough. Better than the old support chatbots that just go "does this FAQ entry solve your problem?" Which it never ever does.
  - tuetuopay 2y ago
    In my experience LLM chatbots are a net improvement because they understand "put me in relation with a human" as opposed to the scripted ones that only spit out the FAQ.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      What? Where are those? I thought support forms, LLM based or not, are designed to never put you in touch with a human.
      - tuetuopay 2y ago
        I guess that an LLM is harder to scope and retain, and does what it is instructed to. While traditional chatbots can only do what they are programmed for (e.g. follow a scenario), LLMs are easier to sidetrack. Thus you as a client may have an easier time escaping their context, especially when it's a generic LLM integration done by underpaid contractors. It really depends, but at least here in france many companies start having support over whatsapp/messenger/the likes. They used to suck hard a few years ago, but my recent experience with sncf connect (french railway company) was surprisingly good given my issue was working around an idiosyncracy of their system. YMMV as we are talking about chatbots and not plain old forms, thus the interactivity is better and feedback loop to escape the LLM's context is faster.
akudha 2y ago
As I become older (and grumpier) I have realized that not engaging is the best thing to do, wherever possible. Dirty restaurant / rude staff? Don't go there. Don't like dark patterns on a website? Contact forms don't work? Don't use those sites. And so on. Two reasons - first, most of the time, these businesses know their shit is broken or they're doing low quality work etc. They just don't care. Second, it is good for our own stress levels to avoid dealing with shitty stuff. Obviously this can't be applied to essential services like healthcare etc.
- stevenae 2y ago
  I co-sign. If I could expand: When you must engage with sub-par experiences, look to redirect in a positive manner. Don't try to brute-force a solution, rather, suggest an alternative that the counterpart may not have considered.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    As I've grown older, I've learned unsolicited advice is almost universally despised (and you have a > 50% chance of making an ass of yourself due to lack of context/armchair general). Therefore, start with a complaint, and if they truly want your feedback, offer it.
    - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
      It’s such a shame. I think I can feel what others do when I get unsolicited advice, but I’m able to regulate my emotions and either take the advice or explain why it’s missing context. If only others could have more humility and analysis ability. But you can’t do too much to change others.
  - amne 2y ago
    Yes. I browse, I see banner (slide, popup, sidebar), I close tab. I have friends that ask me if enjoyed the paragraph about something they shared a link to only for me to have to come back and say I closed it after reading two words and getting interrupted by ”Put your email here to read more". Nope. I tell them that is not a good web experience for me. I just hope that more people start doing this.
foreigner 2y ago
Tip for "collecting structured data": you can prepopulate the email body using a mailto: link with a "prompt" to the sender to fill out the data you need.
- junto 2y ago
  Good tip. Also, many customers will classify their enquiry as “other” anyway.
  - amluto 2y ago
    Of course we do. It’s very common for all the categories except “other” to function as FAQs and to give absolutely no support if the issue isn’t precisely in the list. Other is the new “representative”.
- domdomegg 2y ago
  Great idea! Have added to the article.
wslh 2y ago
No, my contact form, but just rephrasing the author: why do you put a contact form and don't perform QA and best practices on it? Also, the contact form is just another channel (that should work) but not the center of contacts. For example WhatsApp business replaces a lot of these forms in many regions.
- domdomegg 2y ago
  Yep - strongly agree that if you are going ahead with a contact form, you better QA it. I'm not a huge fan of organisations shifting to proprietary social networks being a primary contact method (especially if it's that or a broken contact form). But hoping that the Digital Markets Act's interoperability rules might make this a better experience.
- byyll 2y ago
  I wouldn't rely on a third party for the majority of my customer communication and data.
hgs3 2y ago
Oof I just built a new client contact form for my company. The reason I used a form over email is because (1) a form feels more impersonal so I feel less guilty about not responding to potential clients I have no interest in conducting business with and (2) the form works without JavaScript and I figured displaying an email without JS obfuscation would attract more spam.
egypturnash 2y ago
Holy crap the example of the Sanisbury’s contact form is a brilliant piece of passive-aggressive design. It really screams “We do not want to hear from you over the Internet, peon”.
- domdomegg 2y ago
  I think it is an awful design at present, no doubt about it. It might not be fully intentional though [1]. I suspect it probably started as a more sensible form, with the top text being just the first sentence. Then they realised they got loads of refund contacts that they preferred to deal with by phone so just added the text - without realising how terrible this made the UI. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
miniwark 2y ago
I perfectly understand why a contact form would reject a mail with the domain "example.com". This is obviously not a valid email domain (and may be the default domain used as greyed example in the contact form).
- imaginarypedro 2y ago
  test+test@example.com is a perfectly cromulent email address.
  - Rygian 2y ago
    That's explicitly a fake email address, as it's a special-use domain name reserved by IANA to be used as example/placeholder. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com
- domdomegg 2y ago
  The contact form is linked in the article [1], and it rejects genuinely valid emails. You can try it yourself and see it doesn't have greyed examples, and that the problem is not example.com but the use of symbols. For example, greffe_acces@montréal.ca is a valid in-use email [2] that is rejected. example.com was only used to take an example screenshot. [1] https://adamjones.me/blog/dont-use-contact-forms/#:~:text=management%2C%20offers-,a%20contact%20form,-that%20looks%20like https://adamjones.me/blog/dont-use-contact-forms/#:~:text=ma... [2] https://montreal.ca/sujets/politique-de-confidentialite#:~:text=%C3%AAtre%20exp%C3%A9di%C3%A9e%20%C3%A0-,greffe_acces%40montr%C3%A9al.ca,-ou%20%C3%AAtre%20signifi%C3%A9e https://montreal.ca/sujets/politique-de-confidentialite#:~:t...
neilv 2y ago
> At time of writing, B&Q’s contact form just plainly doesn’t work1. I am fairly amazed that a retailer with revenues in the billions doesn’t notice written queries have stopped coming in. I've noticed customer service forms on brand Web sites are often broken, most commonly by some Web backend error at submission time, but there are other ways, too. For some brands, a broken contact form may be incompetence or corporate dysfunction. But for some of them, it could be a a lazy dark pattern, to reduce customer support costs. (Dark pattern similar to how, when waiting in a holding pattern for telephone customer service, they barge in every 30 seconds, to jolt you into thinking they might be picking up, but then blare, "Your call is important to us! Please remain on hold, and the next available customer service representative will assist you." I assume they know they're making the on-hold experience so much worse.) Of the forms that do work, I'd say at least half the time they trigger an automated email response to call customer service on the telephone. The exact thing you were trying to avoid by opting for a Web form, where you could avoid telephone hell, and also concisely capture the pertinent information in a way that wouldn't get garbled by a CSR (or later by a manager trying to hide a problem). When I have gotten a non-automated email response, it's often someone ignoring the message and latching onto a keyword to send a boilerplate response. Maybe that's good for a poorly treated CSR's metrics, and maybe it also suits someone else's metrics/KPIs/OKRs. Or it's an entirely new boilerplate form, to be done in email, since apparently they asked the wrong things in their Web form. Maybe that one is mostly just ordinary corporate dysfunction, and it also ends up working for some people. Separately, for companies that provide a contact email address... there's the email bounce messages, when the contact address was an email alias that forwards to someone no longer there. Clearly, making sure customer service is covered is When I'm contacting a company, it's usually about a problem they should want to know about, such as if they care about safety. Though I assume that's not the majority of the kinds of complaints they hear. I have sympathy for anyone doing support for large numbers of retail customers/users, but if you chose to do a business that involves that, you can't be disingenuous or negligent about it.
vzaliva 2y ago
Another issue with these forms is that the communication method is asymmetric. You fill out the form to contact the business, but their only way to respond is by sending you an email.
- junto 2y ago
  That’s good for companies though. When dealing with large volumes of customers asymmetric is good. Telephone lines get quickly overloaded.
  - knallfrosch 2y ago
    Asymmetric, not asynchronous.
    - junto 2y ago
      Autocorrect. Sorry.
- aendruk 2y ago
  And then the email has a “noreply” address. Earlier this year I had a whole conversation iteratively submitting the same unidirectional contact form for each turn of dialogue.
ocrow 2y ago
The rate of spam to a form is roughly constant over time, whereas the rate of spam to a published email address goes up over time as the site is repeatedly scanned by spam robots and the address added to more and more spammer lists. While spam detection is good, it isn't perfect. As your total volume of spam goes up, so does the amount that sneaks through the filters. Additionally, at a certain point it becomes impossible to look in your spam filter for misclassified real email. Eventually you're overwhelmed and have to change emails. If you're going to publish an email address you have to consider it a burnable resource that you will replace once the volume of spam is too high. If the author hasn't experienced this, I think it must be because they haven't done the exercise of leaving a live email address on a public website for years.
- squirrel 2y ago
  My email address has been on my public website for at least 15 years, and my spam level is constant and manageable. That may simply indicate that I’m not popular enough to encounter the problem, of course.
  - seabass-labrax 2y ago
    Same for me - I do get spam, and it's frustrating, but the level seems to be broadly constant over time. I wonder if it's deliberate co-operation between scammers and other spam senders, perhaps in order to keep the total amount of spam just under the threshold that would cause people to actually crack down on the issue. Certainly, receiving only single-digit numbers of spam emails each day keeps it just slightly away from being my personal number one priority to get some proper filters installed.
  - byyll 2y ago
    > That may simply indicate that I’m not popular enough to encounter the problem, of course. I get no spam and no non-spam email so that probably indicates I am even less popular.
- domdomegg 2y ago
  Thanks for reading the article! I agree it doesn't consider this point, and I actually hadn't thought of that. Semi-empirically, I've run some websites with emails and contact forms sitting on them for 5+ years and I haven't noticed this effect. Although I must admit I haven't studied it quantitively well enough to determine this for certain - I'd love to look over the data to see if this is true. Unfortunately on all these inboxes spam is deleted automatically after some time so I no longer have records. If you do have data here, it'd be great to see someone publish this and would happily add a link to this analysis! And theoretically, would a contact form link not also be a thing that gets added to more and more lists over time and have the same problem? (Although I also didn't notice this pattern on contact forms, so I'm not claiming this does happen - just a thought experiment on this logic!)
ztetranz 2y ago
If you build a contact form, please at least make it respond automatically with a "we've received your message" email. That at least gives me some confidence that the back end received it and it hopefully went somewhere useful. Without the auto-response I always have doubts if it worked or not.
- knallfrosch 2y ago
  Plus give back all submitted information.
  - ozim 2y ago
    That's not gonna happen. I can put your e-mail in and type out all kind of swear words or put in phishing link in contact for of a company and you would never know it came from me and you would blame that company. I had spammers trying that all the time, multiple times they had some confirmation for buyer of their services - well only me got that info because from any public form we always sent out confirmation and "was it you? if not disregard, please" where content went to our special place so it would be safe, like our sales person not clicking some bs link from such contact form.
    - ycombinator_acc 2y ago
      It does happen and is very handy. Your far-fetched example is easily circumvented with a disclaimer saying this is a form copy (duh). I've never received one that didn't say that.
      - ozim 2y ago
        For authenticated form no problem. For unauthenticated form it is not far-fetched.
- wuj 2y ago
  All contact forms should have a feature similar to Google Form's "Send me a copy of my response" for recordkeeping.
rglullis 2y ago
Incredible, just last week there were people ranting about email as a communication tool, and I was genuinely surprised because my experience is that people still prefer to just send an email to support@communick over asking a question on my support Discourse instance.
Animats 2y ago
> You don't want people to fill in your form The real reason.
- junto 2y ago
  For many companies it’s a core part of their operating procedure. Cost to acquire, cost to serve and churn reduction being the core elements that they watch like hawks. Answering customer queries eats away at that cost to serve variable.
- sexy_seedbox 2y ago
  The public-facing contact form (and stupid chatbot) are for people who didn't bother to read the FAQs, shipping information, return policies... basically the rest of the website in a very structured format with numerous links and in proper hierarchy with breadcrumbs. That's why the public-facing contact form is long and have friction. If you're in the 80% who had self-checked out and paid, you probably won't ever see the contact form and have our customer service email address in a proper "purchase successful" email and you simply reply to that for any follow-up or help.
syradar 2y ago
I have started searching for “@company-url.tld” to find a public email instead of using contact forms
bilater 2y ago
I'll give you a caveat here. To be clear I think any big company should have easy to fill contact forms since they have the resources but as a solo dev building projects I get so much crap from contact forms. It's not even spam - a significant number of users think of the contact form as a chatbot and will ask personal/lazy questions. Sometimes its not even questions. Just one off statements like 'I want to use your product'. OK...then use my product? Its very weird and made me try to hide the form more and add extra fields just to add a little friction.
bennyp101 2y ago
I'm sure I've said this before on here, but I used to work for a company that provided a SaaS solution to my countries biggest Telecoms provider, and I remember them saying that they actively did NOT want people contacting them - I wouldn't be surprised if at some point actively "hostile" interfaces cost less than meat answering the phones/emails
smallerfish 2y ago
We're sitting here blaming companies, but lazy, inexperienced or insufficiently skilled developers can and should be blamed for a significant number of the issues he mentions. The state of software on the web in aggregate is generally abysmal. There's dozens of factors that could lead to apathy about quality, but if you care about UX, you could start by ensuring that what you personally produce has excellent UX, and pushing back on peers or higher-ups where what they specify for you to build is bad (and if you don't know what is good or bad, educate yourself.)
LightBug1 2y ago
Yeah, this rubs me up the wrong way. The matter will have to be very important to get me to engage. I'll enage maybe 5% of the time with contact form
lxgr 2y ago
One of my favorite EU (or German? not sure) regulations is that every company doing business online has to have an email address they actually monitor for customer contact. It’s often the only way to get a written answer in a reliable, persistent medium from a company. Corporate support chats are usually horrible; phone calls leave no proof in case of disputes.
- SushiHippie 2y ago
  > One of my favorite EU (or German? not sure) Maybe there is also an EU regulation now, but at least in Germany the "Telemediengesetz" was introduced in 2007, where §5 "Allgemeine Informationspflichten" is responsible for the need of an Impressum. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tmg/__5.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tmg/__5.html
  - wobfan 2y ago
    That doesn't include a customer support email though. Most of the times, if not all at bigger companies, there's only an email address in the imprint for legal communication, but specifically not for customer support.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Legal communication importantly covers a subscriber cancelling their contract! This is actually one of my most common use cases for writing to the "imprint" email address.
ofrzeta 2y ago
There are a lot of public services and a big insurance company quoted as examples in the blog post. From my consulting experience I can easily imagine how much work, meetings and ceremony got poured in each of these contact forms. Surely they all got enterprisey backends with Spring Boot and whatnot. In another world a junior dev could create better, faster, more ergonomic forms in less time with a more pragmatic approach.
trvz 2y ago
Contact forms are a way for companies to offload work onto you, so the data you're sending them is structured in their preferred manner. That argument goes away with LLMs, which can be decently used to process free-form mail. But then, a company with an already awful contact form will hardly do the work to implement that. I guess there's space for a startup doing that and selling it as a service.
paulcole 2y ago
> it incorrectly rejects some valid emails Stuff like this is a good way to reject people who are likely to be annoying to hear from. And these articles always miss the point that the company doesn’t necessarily want to hear from you.
bradleyjg 2y ago
Also don’t send me an email from noreply@. If you don’t want my email, I don’t want yours.
kkfx 2y ago
I'm one of the few I know off that anytime (almost) I discover a crappy service/UI/* I take time to document and protest. Unfortunately most people protest only with their friends instead of barking at those who made the crap... If we all take time to write USEFUL feedback than even org run by ....... have to take the cry into account.
WalterBright 2y ago
My favorite is one for a local utility. Their payment page has a box for the account number. The account number has dashes in it. The box has a headline "enter your account number, WITHOUT THE DASHES!"
remram 2y ago
Interesting related tidbit: you can put initial values for "subject" and "body" in a mailto URL like so: mailto:support@example.com?subject=feedback&body=What+you+were+doing%3A%0AWhat+happened%3A This lets you provide a template to your users as they prepare to send you an email. edit: Oh that's been added to the article
makingstuffs 2y ago
When I was working at one of the UK’s high street fashion brands we used to regularly get told to make the contact form non functional during periods of high traffic, just an FYI.
tomjen3 2y ago
It costs about 10 dollars to have a certified letter sent through an online service - that includes printing and being put into an envelope. It costs a lot less if you don't need to get it certified. So if your time is worth more than 10 dollars an hour, its is quicker for you to send a normal letter than waste time with their form.
lakomen 2y ago
Mine has an optional email address field, required subject text field and a required message textarea field and a submit button. No captcha, because submission is JS based, which, so far (11 years), no spam bot is able to crack. I believe that most contact forms, like those phone support press 1 for and 2 for etc, are done so you don't actually contact support. And most times contacting support results in no support being given, so I tend to not even care anymore. If something is annoying or doesn't work I won't use it anymore.
garfieldnate 2y ago
I've had a heck of a time filling out forms on Japanese websites in particular. Insert name here No no, roman letters not allowed No no, katakana are fine but half width only No no, spaces or separating dots not okay, just ram your first and last together into an unreadable blob We'll go ahead and clear the entire form out so you can refill it any time you make a mistake. [edit: formatting]
byyll 2y ago
A bit off-topic but is there some law in the US that mandates people to say things like "This article is written solely in my personal capacity, and does not represent the views of any organisations I am affiliated with."?

324 points by domdomegg 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dazc 2y ago

On the other side, a typical contact form message reads something like... 'Of course I have read the FAQs but just wanted to ask the exact same question which happens to be the very first FAQ on the list... Also, publishing an email address seldom works out well.

hnbad 2y ago
Sure but that message would be no worse if sent by email instead of contact form. And he does address the "risk" of publishing an email address. I can second that I've seen more spam from WordPress forms than published email addresses.

notatoad 2y ago

And I don’t want to read your email…

delish 2y ago

>I don't want to fill out your contact form Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be _contacted_ by you. It's a cost to them. The median "contact us for a sales quote" form is clearer and has less friction than the median "file a complaint / ask a question" form. One reason not in the article people might use forms instead of email is the "set and setting" of being a guest on a website and filling out their form. When in "your" email inbox as opposed to on "someone else's" site, you may conduct yourself differently. An example of this is the sometimes-onerous Github issue template questions. I'm not arguing they're not necessary, but they do two things: mandate required information and _imply_ that you are a guest and you must hold yourself to someone else's communication norms.

carlosjobim 2y ago
> Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be _contacted_ by you. For a company to make a sale, there needs to be a way for the client to contact them, a way to make a purchase. Having crap contact forms makes as much sense as having restaurant waiters spit clients in the face to greet them. With the world we're living in that might become the norm in a few years or months.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  I've worked for client who spend a lot of money optimizing form fill-out rates down to the nth degree. I once worked on a mortgage form. It had a pic of a call center person next to it. I persuaded my boss to try a pic of a dog with a tie, glasses and headset I found instead. It increased the conversion rate by 17%. People are weird.
  - ycombinator_acc 2y ago
    Correlation is not causation.
Aurornis 2y ago
> but they do two things: mandate required information and _imply_ that you are a guest and you must hold yourself to someone else's communication norms. To be honest, tools like this do quite a good job of filtering out people who want you to bend over backward for them. If someone is so stubborn that they refuse to take a couple minutes to fill out someone’s form, they’re likely to be very demanding and uncooperative with every future engagement. Of course, these people never see themselves as such.

amluto 2y ago

> Hook up a shared mailbox, collaborative inbox, or one of the many off-the-shelf customer service solutions like Zendesk, Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, Zammad, osTicket, or FreeScout to your email. This list is missing the classic, and still excellent, Request Tracker. https://bestpractical.com/request-tracker https://bestpractical.com/request-tracker https://github.com/bestpractical/rt https://github.com/bestpractical/rt (I have no affiliation, and I’ve only ever interacted with it from the request-submitting side. But it’s always been straightforward and rock-solid, and it’s worth something that the same system has worked continuously for apparently 20 years. And it’s flexible enough that I once worked with a small institution that wired up Request Tracker for submitting jobs to a large-format printer.)

dijit 2y ago
I used it at one company, that company switched to Jira. I miss RT, it was ugly but good.
domdomegg 2y ago
Thanks for the recommendation, will add!
Repulsion9513 2y ago
It's funny how easy it is for something to just keep working when they aren't badly combining it with other services they purchased (hi ZenDesk, I still can't delete users in it because that's part of "Support" which we don't use, but I can create users just fine because that's still part of "Chat").
SoftTalker 2y ago
Last time I worked with RT, to do anything custom you had to script it in perl. That's a language that hasn't been popular for a couple of decades (yes I know it's still running a lot of stuff, but try to hire a Perl dev in 2024), good luck. Maybe a case where AI could help. But not sure even AI knows about RT "scriptlets"

npilk 2y ago

> You might want to use a contact form to collect structured data, so it saves you time processing requests. For example, making sure the customer provides the right identifiers for you to find them on your systems quickly, or automatically assigning queries to the right teams. As the author alludes to, I think collecting structured data from unstructured input (e.g. inbound support emails) is a very promising real-world use case for LLMs. The goal would be to make it as easy as possible for users to send you information, and then use AI to parse what you need out of it. This would lead to less frustrated users and even increased response rates (for reasons the author mentions). I've been playing around with this idea at https://www.semiform.ai https://www.semiform.ai for anyone interested.

domdomegg 2y ago
This does seem pretty cool. I have not spent too long looking at this but a few bits of initial feedback: 1. Appreciation for an informative site: I like that your website actually explains what your product does in simple terms. So many marketing sites are impossible to parse, so it's cool that this one gets to the point quickly. Bonus points for having a live demo without a sign up. 2. Dealing with uncertainty / edge cases: One worry I'd have is that this might miss things that are relevant, or doesn't capture uncertainty well. I'd probably want a default of a 'flag for a human because this doesn't fit in the boxes well' marker by default on all forms. For example, if someone responds to the conference example with 'Sure, I'll be there on Monday and I wear a size M. Also I am in a wheelchair so will need the venue to be accessible - please let me know if it's not.', I'd want to make sure this gets flagged rather than the automated system ignoring the last part (especially as people might expect humans to read the response to an email).

dewey 2y ago

The rant should be: „Don’t break your contact form“, forms that are done well are good for both sides. Better triage on the receiver end, quicker response for the sender.

YetAnotherNick 2y ago

The biggest complaint of the author seems to be needing to give out his data to fill a form. This is very much intentional. In my company, almost all of the contact form submissions tried to sell us something, sometimes in very deceiving way(e.g. I found something broken in your front page which leads to poor search engine ranking, and I can help fix it), if not outright spam.

parpfish 2y ago
But this is so frustrating when you need to contact a company and you don’t have the info they want. A while back we wanted to have the physical landlines from the phone company removed from our house. I found the company, but every contact form asked for my account number. If I didn’t provide one, Id get redirected to their sales team because obviously I was trying to create a new account. I don’t remember how I got it fixed other than a lot of time on hold.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  Support and contact are two different things. Companies shouldn't have existing customer to fill the generic contact us form.

mrbluecoat 2y ago

> There are some organisations that intentionally want their form to be difficult to complete - perhaps it’s a regulatory requirement that you don’t really want to comply with. If you’re doing this, you should probably feel bad. Bad contact forms I encounter usually fall into this category.

chrismorgan 2y ago

> In theory, your customer might be using an email provider that doesn’t support encryption - which could lead them to sending something to you insecurely and putting them at risk. I think most organisations can accept this risk given how rare this is, given that this is on the customer’s end. I think we’ve reached the stage where major providers are rejecting messages over cleartext, right? Requiring either explicit TLS or STARTTLS?

lambdaxyzw 2y ago
I seriously doubt it. I've tried to set up my (tiny) company email TLS-only, and had to backtrack two days later when two different customers complained that their emails were bounced. One of them was representing a major national bank. I've lost the last bit of hope for e-mail I had.

nottorp 2y ago

Contact forms are dead. These days you type some text in a box and a LLM gives you a few answers that are totally unrelated to your problem. If you want to contact support, you have to threaten to cancel. If they even care about that.

xingped 2y ago
So far I've somehow only run across one LLM support chatbot. And it was actually mostly helpful. Not 100% but decent enough. Better than the old support chatbots that just go "does this FAQ entry solve your problem?" Which it never ever does.
- tuetuopay 2y ago
  In my experience LLM chatbots are a net improvement because they understand "put me in relation with a human" as opposed to the scripted ones that only spit out the FAQ.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    What? Where are those? I thought support forms, LLM based or not, are designed to never put you in touch with a human.
    - tuetuopay 2y ago
      I guess that an LLM is harder to scope and retain, and does what it is instructed to. While traditional chatbots can only do what they are programmed for (e.g. follow a scenario), LLMs are easier to sidetrack. Thus you as a client may have an easier time escaping their context, especially when it's a generic LLM integration done by underpaid contractors. It really depends, but at least here in france many companies start having support over whatsapp/messenger/the likes. They used to suck hard a few years ago, but my recent experience with sncf connect (french railway company) was surprisingly good given my issue was working around an idiosyncracy of their system. YMMV as we are talking about chatbots and not plain old forms, thus the interactivity is better and feedback loop to escape the LLM's context is faster.

akudha 2y ago

As I become older (and grumpier) I have realized that not engaging is the best thing to do, wherever possible. Dirty restaurant / rude staff? Don't go there. Don't like dark patterns on a website? Contact forms don't work? Don't use those sites. And so on. Two reasons - first, most of the time, these businesses know their shit is broken or they're doing low quality work etc. They just don't care. Second, it is good for our own stress levels to avoid dealing with shitty stuff. Obviously this can't be applied to essential services like healthcare etc.

stevenae 2y ago
I co-sign. If I could expand: When you must engage with sub-par experiences, look to redirect in a positive manner. Don't try to brute-force a solution, rather, suggest an alternative that the counterpart may not have considered.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  As I've grown older, I've learned unsolicited advice is almost universally despised (and you have a > 50% chance of making an ass of yourself due to lack of context/armchair general). Therefore, start with a complaint, and if they truly want your feedback, offer it.
  - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    It’s such a shame. I think I can feel what others do when I get unsolicited advice, but I’m able to regulate my emotions and either take the advice or explain why it’s missing context. If only others could have more humility and analysis ability. But you can’t do too much to change others.
- amne 2y ago
  Yes. I browse, I see banner (slide, popup, sidebar), I close tab. I have friends that ask me if enjoyed the paragraph about something they shared a link to only for me to have to come back and say I closed it after reading two words and getting interrupted by ”Put your email here to read more". Nope. I tell them that is not a good web experience for me. I just hope that more people start doing this.

foreigner 2y ago

Tip for "collecting structured data": you can prepopulate the email body using a mailto: link with a "prompt" to the sender to fill out the data you need.

junto 2y ago
Good tip. Also, many customers will classify their enquiry as “other” anyway.
- amluto 2y ago
  Of course we do. It’s very common for all the categories except “other” to function as FAQs and to give absolutely no support if the issue isn’t precisely in the list. Other is the new “representative”.
domdomegg 2y ago
Great idea! Have added to the article.

wslh 2y ago

No, my contact form, but just rephrasing the author: why do you put a contact form and don't perform QA and best practices on it? Also, the contact form is just another channel (that should work) but not the center of contacts. For example WhatsApp business replaces a lot of these forms in many regions.

domdomegg 2y ago
Yep - strongly agree that if you are going ahead with a contact form, you better QA it. I'm not a huge fan of organisations shifting to proprietary social networks being a primary contact method (especially if it's that or a broken contact form). But hoping that the Digital Markets Act's interoperability rules might make this a better experience.
byyll 2y ago
I wouldn't rely on a third party for the majority of my customer communication and data.

hgs3 2y ago

Oof I just built a new client contact form for my company. The reason I used a form over email is because (1) a form feels more impersonal so I feel less guilty about not responding to potential clients I have no interest in conducting business with and (2) the form works without JavaScript and I figured displaying an email without JS obfuscation would attract more spam.

egypturnash 2y ago

Holy crap the example of the Sanisbury’s contact form is a brilliant piece of passive-aggressive design. It really screams “We do not want to hear from you over the Internet, peon”.

domdomegg 2y ago
I think it is an awful design at present, no doubt about it. It might not be fully intentional though [1]. I suspect it probably started as a more sensible form, with the top text being just the first sentence. Then they realised they got loads of refund contacts that they preferred to deal with by phone so just added the text - without realising how terrible this made the UI. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

miniwark 2y ago

I perfectly understand why a contact form would reject a mail with the domain "example.com". This is obviously not a valid email domain (and may be the default domain used as greyed example in the contact form).

imaginarypedro 2y ago
test+test@example.com is a perfectly cromulent email address.
- Rygian 2y ago
  That's explicitly a fake email address, as it's a special-use domain name reserved by IANA to be used as example/placeholder. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com
domdomegg 2y ago
The contact form is linked in the article [1], and it rejects genuinely valid emails. You can try it yourself and see it doesn't have greyed examples, and that the problem is not example.com but the use of symbols. For example, greffe_acces@montréal.ca is a valid in-use email [2] that is rejected. example.com was only used to take an example screenshot. [1] https://adamjones.me/blog/dont-use-contact-forms/#:~:text=management%2C%20offers-,a%20contact%20form,-that%20looks%20like https://adamjones.me/blog/dont-use-contact-forms/#:~:text=ma... [2] https://montreal.ca/sujets/politique-de-confidentialite#:~:text=%C3%AAtre%20exp%C3%A9di%C3%A9e%20%C3%A0-,greffe_acces%40montr%C3%A9al.ca,-ou%20%C3%AAtre%20signifi%C3%A9e https://montreal.ca/sujets/politique-de-confidentialite#:~:t...

neilv 2y ago

> At time of writing, B&Q’s contact form just plainly doesn’t work1. I am fairly amazed that a retailer with revenues in the billions doesn’t notice written queries have stopped coming in. I've noticed customer service forms on brand Web sites are often broken, most commonly by some Web backend error at submission time, but there are other ways, too. For some brands, a broken contact form may be incompetence or corporate dysfunction. But for some of them, it could be a a lazy dark pattern, to reduce customer support costs. (Dark pattern similar to how, when waiting in a holding pattern for telephone customer service, they barge in every 30 seconds, to jolt you into thinking they might be picking up, but then blare, "Your call is important to us! Please remain on hold, and the next available customer service representative will assist you." I assume they know they're making the on-hold experience so much worse.) Of the forms that do work, I'd say at least half the time they trigger an automated email response to call customer service on the telephone. The exact thing you were trying to avoid by opting for a Web form, where you could avoid telephone hell, and also concisely capture the pertinent information in a way that wouldn't get garbled by a CSR (or later by a manager trying to hide a problem). When I have gotten a non-automated email response, it's often someone ignoring the message and latching onto a keyword to send a boilerplate response. Maybe that's good for a poorly treated CSR's metrics, and maybe it also suits someone else's metrics/KPIs/OKRs. Or it's an entirely new boilerplate form, to be done in email, since apparently they asked the wrong things in their Web form. Maybe that one is mostly just ordinary corporate dysfunction, and it also ends up working for some people. Separately, for companies that provide a contact email address... there's the email bounce messages, when the contact address was an email alias that forwards to someone no longer there. Clearly, making sure customer service is covered is When I'm contacting a company, it's usually about a problem they should want to know about, such as if they care about safety. Though I assume that's not the majority of the kinds of complaints they hear. I have sympathy for anyone doing support for large numbers of retail customers/users, but if you chose to do a business that involves that, you can't be disingenuous or negligent about it.

vzaliva 2y ago

Another issue with these forms is that the communication method is asymmetric. You fill out the form to contact the business, but their only way to respond is by sending you an email.

junto 2y ago
That’s good for companies though. When dealing with large volumes of customers asymmetric is good. Telephone lines get quickly overloaded.
- knallfrosch 2y ago
  Asymmetric, not asynchronous.
  - junto 2y ago
    Autocorrect. Sorry.
aendruk 2y ago
And then the email has a “noreply” address. Earlier this year I had a whole conversation iteratively submitting the same unidirectional contact form for each turn of dialogue.

ocrow 2y ago

The rate of spam to a form is roughly constant over time, whereas the rate of spam to a published email address goes up over time as the site is repeatedly scanned by spam robots and the address added to more and more spammer lists. While spam detection is good, it isn't perfect. As your total volume of spam goes up, so does the amount that sneaks through the filters. Additionally, at a certain point it becomes impossible to look in your spam filter for misclassified real email. Eventually you're overwhelmed and have to change emails. If you're going to publish an email address you have to consider it a burnable resource that you will replace once the volume of spam is too high. If the author hasn't experienced this, I think it must be because they haven't done the exercise of leaving a live email address on a public website for years.

squirrel 2y ago
My email address has been on my public website for at least 15 years, and my spam level is constant and manageable. That may simply indicate that I’m not popular enough to encounter the problem, of course.
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  Same for me - I do get spam, and it's frustrating, but the level seems to be broadly constant over time. I wonder if it's deliberate co-operation between scammers and other spam senders, perhaps in order to keep the total amount of spam just under the threshold that would cause people to actually crack down on the issue. Certainly, receiving only single-digit numbers of spam emails each day keeps it just slightly away from being my personal number one priority to get some proper filters installed.
- byyll 2y ago
  > That may simply indicate that I’m not popular enough to encounter the problem, of course. I get no spam and no non-spam email so that probably indicates I am even less popular.
domdomegg 2y ago
Thanks for reading the article! I agree it doesn't consider this point, and I actually hadn't thought of that. Semi-empirically, I've run some websites with emails and contact forms sitting on them for 5+ years and I haven't noticed this effect. Although I must admit I haven't studied it quantitively well enough to determine this for certain - I'd love to look over the data to see if this is true. Unfortunately on all these inboxes spam is deleted automatically after some time so I no longer have records. If you do have data here, it'd be great to see someone publish this and would happily add a link to this analysis! And theoretically, would a contact form link not also be a thing that gets added to more and more lists over time and have the same problem? (Although I also didn't notice this pattern on contact forms, so I'm not claiming this does happen - just a thought experiment on this logic!)

ztetranz 2y ago

If you build a contact form, please at least make it respond automatically with a "we've received your message" email. That at least gives me some confidence that the back end received it and it hopefully went somewhere useful. Without the auto-response I always have doubts if it worked or not.

knallfrosch 2y ago
Plus give back all submitted information.
- ozim 2y ago
  That's not gonna happen. I can put your e-mail in and type out all kind of swear words or put in phishing link in contact for of a company and you would never know it came from me and you would blame that company. I had spammers trying that all the time, multiple times they had some confirmation for buyer of their services - well only me got that info because from any public form we always sent out confirmation and "was it you? if not disregard, please" where content went to our special place so it would be safe, like our sales person not clicking some bs link from such contact form.
  - ycombinator_acc 2y ago
    It does happen and is very handy. Your far-fetched example is easily circumvented with a disclaimer saying this is a form copy (duh). I've never received one that didn't say that.
    - ozim 2y ago
      For authenticated form no problem. For unauthenticated form it is not far-fetched.
wuj 2y ago
All contact forms should have a feature similar to Google Form's "Send me a copy of my response" for recordkeeping.

rglullis 2y ago

Incredible, just last week there were people ranting about email as a communication tool, and I was genuinely surprised because my experience is that people still prefer to just send an email to support@communick over asking a question on my support Discourse instance.

Animats 2y ago

> You don't want people to fill in your form The real reason.

junto 2y ago
For many companies it’s a core part of their operating procedure. Cost to acquire, cost to serve and churn reduction being the core elements that they watch like hawks. Answering customer queries eats away at that cost to serve variable.
sexy_seedbox 2y ago
The public-facing contact form (and stupid chatbot) are for people who didn't bother to read the FAQs, shipping information, return policies... basically the rest of the website in a very structured format with numerous links and in proper hierarchy with breadcrumbs. That's why the public-facing contact form is long and have friction. If you're in the 80% who had self-checked out and paid, you probably won't ever see the contact form and have our customer service email address in a proper "purchase successful" email and you simply reply to that for any follow-up or help.

syradar 2y ago

I have started searching for “@company-url.tld” to find a public email instead of using contact forms

bilater 2y ago

I'll give you a caveat here. To be clear I think any big company should have easy to fill contact forms since they have the resources but as a solo dev building projects I get so much crap from contact forms. It's not even spam - a significant number of users think of the contact form as a chatbot and will ask personal/lazy questions. Sometimes its not even questions. Just one off statements like 'I want to use your product'. OK...then use my product? Its very weird and made me try to hide the form more and add extra fields just to add a little friction.

bennyp101 2y ago

I'm sure I've said this before on here, but I used to work for a company that provided a SaaS solution to my countries biggest Telecoms provider, and I remember them saying that they actively did NOT want people contacting them - I wouldn't be surprised if at some point actively "hostile" interfaces cost less than meat answering the phones/emails

smallerfish 2y ago

We're sitting here blaming companies, but lazy, inexperienced or insufficiently skilled developers can and should be blamed for a significant number of the issues he mentions. The state of software on the web in aggregate is generally abysmal. There's dozens of factors that could lead to apathy about quality, but if you care about UX, you could start by ensuring that what you personally produce has excellent UX, and pushing back on peers or higher-ups where what they specify for you to build is bad (and if you don't know what is good or bad, educate yourself.)

LightBug1 2y ago

Yeah, this rubs me up the wrong way. The matter will have to be very important to get me to engage. I'll enage maybe 5% of the time with contact form

lxgr 2y ago

One of my favorite EU (or German? not sure) regulations is that every company doing business online has to have an email address they actually monitor for customer contact. It’s often the only way to get a written answer in a reliable, persistent medium from a company. Corporate support chats are usually horrible; phone calls leave no proof in case of disputes.

SushiHippie 2y ago
> One of my favorite EU (or German? not sure) Maybe there is also an EU regulation now, but at least in Germany the "Telemediengesetz" was introduced in 2007, where §5 "Allgemeine Informationspflichten" is responsible for the need of an Impressum. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tmg/__5.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tmg/__5.html
- wobfan 2y ago
  That doesn't include a customer support email though. Most of the times, if not all at bigger companies, there's only an email address in the imprint for legal communication, but specifically not for customer support.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Legal communication importantly covers a subscriber cancelling their contract! This is actually one of my most common use cases for writing to the "imprint" email address.

ofrzeta 2y ago

There are a lot of public services and a big insurance company quoted as examples in the blog post. From my consulting experience I can easily imagine how much work, meetings and ceremony got poured in each of these contact forms. Surely they all got enterprisey backends with Spring Boot and whatnot. In another world a junior dev could create better, faster, more ergonomic forms in less time with a more pragmatic approach.

trvz 2y ago

Contact forms are a way for companies to offload work onto you, so the data you're sending them is structured in their preferred manner. That argument goes away with LLMs, which can be decently used to process free-form mail. But then, a company with an already awful contact form will hardly do the work to implement that. I guess there's space for a startup doing that and selling it as a service.

paulcole 2y ago

> it incorrectly rejects some valid emails Stuff like this is a good way to reject people who are likely to be annoying to hear from. And these articles always miss the point that the company doesn’t necessarily want to hear from you.

bradleyjg 2y ago

Also don’t send me an email from noreply@. If you don’t want my email, I don’t want yours.

kkfx 2y ago

I'm one of the few I know off that anytime (almost) I discover a crappy service/UI/* I take time to document and protest. Unfortunately most people protest only with their friends instead of barking at those who made the crap... If we all take time to write USEFUL feedback than even org run by ....... have to take the cry into account.

WalterBright 2y ago

My favorite is one for a local utility. Their payment page has a box for the account number. The account number has dashes in it. The box has a headline "enter your account number, WITHOUT THE DASHES!"

remram 2y ago

Interesting related tidbit: you can put initial values for "subject" and "body" in a mailto URL like so: mailto:support@example.com?subject=feedback&body=What+you+were+doing%3A%0AWhat+happened%3A This lets you provide a template to your users as they prepare to send you an email. edit: Oh that's been added to the article

makingstuffs 2y ago

When I was working at one of the UK’s high street fashion brands we used to regularly get told to make the contact form non functional during periods of high traffic, just an FYI.

tomjen3 2y ago

It costs about 10 dollars to have a certified letter sent through an online service - that includes printing and being put into an envelope. It costs a lot less if you don't need to get it certified. So if your time is worth more than 10 dollars an hour, its is quicker for you to send a normal letter than waste time with their form.

lakomen 2y ago

Mine has an optional email address field, required subject text field and a required message textarea field and a submit button. No captcha, because submission is JS based, which, so far (11 years), no spam bot is able to crack. I believe that most contact forms, like those phone support press 1 for and 2 for etc, are done so you don't actually contact support. And most times contacting support results in no support being given, so I tend to not even care anymore. If something is annoying or doesn't work I won't use it anymore.

garfieldnate 2y ago

I've had a heck of a time filling out forms on Japanese websites in particular. Insert name here No no, roman letters not allowed No no, katakana are fine but half width only No no, spaces or separating dots not okay, just ram your first and last together into an unreadable blob We'll go ahead and clear the entire form out so you can refill it any time you make a mistake. [edit: formatting]

byyll 2y ago

A bit off-topic but is there some law in the US that mandates people to say things like "This article is written solely in my personal capacity, and does not represent the views of any organisations I am affiliated with."?