ITP Inspired Journal

It’s hard not to love Googles little banner changes to indicate something important or newsworthy that happened on this day. Usually the banner is just an image but the Pacmac image was animated. This was interesting for two reasons, first the banner had the detrimental effect of taking the focus from the search panel, in other words if you had the poor luck of typing in your search item when the banner started animating it took your cursor out of the search box. This minor but annoying flaw was not something you usually see in a big player like Google.

The interesting part was that the banner was NOT done in Flash, had it been it wouldn’t have produced the strange behavior… but this is the type of argument that people usually blame Flash for. While Apple and Adobe are arguing over the merits/detriments of the Flash platform it is plain to see that glitches can occur in any technology and it is usually the person doing the coding and not the technology.

I have been using Linkedin for awhile now and recently haven’t had the success that I was looking for, something is missing and I can’t put my finger on what it is. I am currently subscribed as a “business account” which is one step up from the free personal account. I wanted to edit my account and downgrade to the free personal as I don’t wish to completely leave the network.

To my surprise there doesn’t seem to be a quick way to do this…. sure, if you want to upgrade your account the fine people at Linkedin are happy to provide you with a simple button to click to go right to billing you for an upgrade. Mysteriously or not so, there is no account control to change or downgrade your account type.

This type of problem is often perceived by the user as their inability to navigate to the right area, but not providing a simple path to complete control really seems to be a way for a company to make change hard for the user in the hopes of dissuading the customer/user from changing at all. The only path to this type of change is an email form to submit a request. AN EMAIL FORM! I find it hard to think that this is an oversight or bad design by the UX people at Linkedin, but simply a strategy by management to squeeze out a few more billing cycles from their customers.

This type of thing is maddening because life is busy enough that this issue shouldn’t be weighing on my mind at all…

So I have given Linked in one hour before I close my account completely. I don’t like being stalled by intentional roadblocks to my control of my account. Give your users an honest transparency to controls and a fast and responsive mechanism and they won’t feel like a desperate company is holding on to their dollars. In this economy change should be easy as dollars are precious.