PC World – Online Subscriptions

Published on February 3rd, 2010 by Jeremy Chatfield

There’s a classic FAIL in user handling on many eCommerce sites: forcing users to register details before you’ve explained the reason and value. People know that they need to hand over addresses for shipping, but requiring them to offer these details before you’ve verified that the items are in stock and available, or that you need the details in order to complete shipping calculations, is regarded as invasive and a likely attempt to add you to a mailing list rather than service the attempted purchase.

Rant mode engaged…

PC World is using an analagous “grab everything early” model for it’s online forums. Instead of the relaxed model used by Google, where you can add increasingly large amounts of personal data to your online persona, PC World *requires* a form to be completed, and users to identify what email newsletters they’ll receive, in order to drop a comment on an article.

Making this even worse, is that the form user interface has a particularly stupid problem. When filling in details, you must provide email address, country of residence and… a US Zip Code. I live in the UK. Strangely, I don’t have a US Zip code for my UK address.

Annoyingly, every time I tried a new way to pass this obstacle, it would keep re-checking the “please bombard me with offers for stuff I don’t want” box. If I uncheck the box, have the courtesy to leave it unchecked. This forced re-checking may well increase sign up rates, but it doesn’t make PC World more loved and needed.

I poked, quickly, around the PC World site looking for a way to provide feedback, and couldn’t find an obvious way to suggest that the registration process was both onerous and broken. So that’s why i’m posting here… PC World has made it clear that the audience is US-only and Foreigners can fuck off aren’t important. And PC World don’t want to hear from me unless they can try and sell me something. I’m not interested in engaging with that kind of business. So, I won’t be part of PC World forums, even for a single comment.

Lessons

If you want to offer social media, it has to be, like a good sales process, easier to be engaged than not. Good marketing and purchase systems make you feel welcome and make the process so easy that it is almost easier to buy than walk away (and that *doesn’t* mean making walking away harder with mousetrapping and other technological tricks). Look at Twitter and FaceBook – easy to sign up and you get invited to be involved, not pressured.

Undoubtedly PC World would see the newsletter sign up rate decline if they changed their registration process. And the deliberate discarding of my preference to avoid unwanted email is just insulting. What, my preference to avoid newsletters I won’t read, is not important to you?

I know PC World wants money, and they want to act a gateway to valuable information. But guys, you aren’t the sole source of information. You need to (re-)read Clay Shirky on Paywalls. What you’re doing with onerous registration forms for commenters, is creating a soft paywall around interaction. That’s not a good idea, long term, IMO. Competitors who make it easier to engage, will probably start beating you – as there’ll be more comments from people less engaged tightly… and those people could fall into your influence if you handle them well.

PCWorld guys, stop thinking like an offline paper with an online presence. Start thinking about how to properly engage with an audience.

Rant over.

Summary

There’s lessons about handling user interactions here.

Users don’t mind engaging with you.

They don’t like being “sold at”.

They don’t like you requiring lots of data before they engage lightly.

Can I avoid PC World? Absolutely. It wouldn’t break my heart if I never saw another PC World article. If they do cover things that interest me, and I think either the author or a commenter has missed the point, I might comment. But now, I’d rather Twitter it than do so on the PC World site. And that makes Twitter richer and PC World poorer.

Think about “friction”.

How hard is it for your users to engage with you? How easily can they point out problems that might help you? Yes, they’ll post other stuff too, but you know what? I got serious, private, answers about the best way to use GitHub public and private repositories from Tekkub. Imagine how I feel about Tekkub and GitHub now. Compare that with how I feel about PC World. Losing GitHub would be a major problem for me. I already pay GitHub for a private Repository. I’d pay them more, to make sure they kept running. PC World? I genuinely don’t care.

Brands have to engage with and be useful to their clients, to be well regarded over long periods. I think PC World set up short sighted performance measurements surrounding registration and sign up, and lost the plot. Make sure you don’t do the same for your business.