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The fuck off contact page

nicchan.me

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Re: The fuck off contact page

#101

Post by Macha »

hnarn wrote: post #90
ares623 wrote: post #3

Off topic but love the site design

It's "cool" but in terms of usability I think it's terrible. I would think that someone who works full time as a designer and has strong opinions on right and wrong would think twice about wasting screen real estate on mobile devices with a bunch of bullshit like a sticky menu, footer and comically huge "window"-headers. The only thing I see is the design equivalent of over-engineering a car with bells and whistles t…

For example, I read it on a 10 inch tablet, so the line length for the article was about seven words which required a lot of extra scrolling, and it’s scrolling within a box so I needed to scroll in a specific area of the page, rather than just scroll the whole page

Re: The fuck off contact page

#102

Post by scott_w »

permo-w wrote: post #39

I'm not sure I've ever seen a contact page that wasn't like this. I always felt it was basically reasonable. if you can direct someone to an answer without having to waste money/time/compute on providing custom service, then that seems basically reasonable to me. yes it's annoying, but it's not a pattern I've ever felt was particularly dark. I'm perfectly happy with "speaking to a human" being the last port of call t…

As the article points out, it depends on what you want. Do you want customers to reach out? For some, the answer really is "yes," for whatever reason that may be.

The author isn't generically ranting against contact pages that redirect you to support documentation — they're pointing out that this customer wasn't considering the customer behaviour they wanted and instead followed a trend. In this case, it was counter to what they wanted the customer to do.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#103

Post by kmoser »

permo-w wrote: post #39

I'm not sure I've ever seen a contact page that wasn't like this. I always felt it was basically reasonable. if you can direct someone to an answer without having to waste money/time/compute on providing custom service, then that seems basically reasonable to me. yes it's annoying, but it's not a pattern I've ever felt was particularly dark. I'm perfectly happy with "speaking to a human" being the last port of call t…

> I'm perfectly happy with "speaking to a human" being the last port of call to fix a problem.

Both versions of the Contact page have issues. The author's version (with only a form) doesn't let you specify whether you want to contact sales, support, or other. Once submitted, you have no way of knowing whether it succeeded, or who it got sent to (as opposed to sending an email, which will at least bounce if it's a bad address).

As for the client's version of the page, the only way of contacting a human is to get in touch with the sales team, which in my experience is all but useless if you need support. (Also "Reach out to..." is corporate doublespeak, and it's not immediately obvious what will happen when you click that button: mailto? tel? Input form? Other?) There's nothing more annoying than hunting for, say, a company's address, clicking the "Contact" link, and having it mailto instead of giving you the info you need.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#104

Post by alt227 »

unloader6118 wrote: post #59

The contact page on the left is something I absolutely hate. If the prefer method of contact is email, just give me an email. If they need to enter that into some ticketing system, give me access to the ticketing system. The page on right give me some ideas how they handle things internally. The form on left is almost certainly a webform-to-email, this is ridiculous. looking at font choice, how ironic they are compla…

I disagree.

If you put an email address on a contact page, all manner of sh*t is going to be thrown at you.

Automated marketing services, scammers, competitors, everyone and their dog are going to be filling up your customer service inbox and costing you time and money to manage it.

Put a contact form on your website and you can secure it with a capture, which is not bulltproof but it sure does filter out a lot of automated noise for you. Then you will find that people are generally a lot quicker to fire off an email than fill out a contact form. In my experience this generally puts one more 'thinking barrier' between you and the public, which again cuts down noise significantly.

Also, click the 'settings' button in the bottom right, and you will see they have given you a choice of fonts. Sometimes it pays to look a tiny bit further to see whether your issue has already been solved, before complaining about it.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#105

Post by egorfine »

savolai wrote: post #56

Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.

It is truly an excellent design. Thus I am so grateful for the "Reader mode" in Safari that allowed me to actually read the article.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#106

Post by ohhellnawman »

bjackman wrote: post #70
savolai wrote: post #56

Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.

I also admired this and for a moment thought "I should steal this person's style". Then I quickly realised I am not even close to capable of pulling a design like that off, on so many dimensions. I guess that's why this person is a professional designer and I'm a person who's never worked on a product with a UI in his career!

[dead]

Re: The fuck off contact page

#107

Post by devsda »

I really want to believe that many of the "fuck off contact pages" that we see are a result of just naive clients mimicking other flashy sites but I think that in most cases it is just a conscious decision to reduce/limit support costs.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#108

Post by fanf2 »

savolai wrote: post #56

Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.

It has broken scrolling, very irritating. Scroll to top doesn’t work at all and when I fiddle with the fake windows regular scrolling can’t decide if the fake window or the whole page should scroll.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#109

Post by devsda »

n4r9 wrote: post #55
latexr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure I've ever seen a contact page that wasn't like this. Click the “Contact” link at the bottom of this HN page. It’s a mailto link. mailto:hn@ycombinator.com Reeder has a simple contact form on the page. https://reederapp.com/classic/ Overcast list an email and social media to contact. https://overcast.fm/contact Alfred points to the forum and lists email addresses to contact. https://www.alfredapp.com/he…

Deutsche Bahn has a good contact page: https://int.bahn.de/en/help/contact Conversely, Virgin Media's is well into the "f** off" realm: https://www.virginmedia.com/support/help/contact-us

On Virgin Media's page, if you answer "no" to the "is it helpful" question, you apparently get the support forum and chat with us options.

Re: The fuck off contact page

#110

Post by blenderob »

egorfine wrote: post #105
savolai wrote: post #56

Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.

It is truly an excellent design. Thus I am so grateful for the "Reader mode" in Safari that allowed me to actually read the article.

No kidding! Half way down I began to get a headache. Took me a moment to understand that it was the difficult-to-read font that was inducing headache. Switched to "Reader mode" and instant relief!

Excellent design. But not for me. Thank you Reader mode!

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