I was filling out a contact form on a business's website, to ask them a question about a product. Unfortunately, they limited the number of characters in the main box of the form, and my question was way over the limit. So I edited out all the niceties, ("I was wondering if...", "Would it be possible to...", "Thank you very much") but I was still over the character limit. So then I eliminated the background information to give some context of why I was making this request. Still over the limit. So I pared down my prose as much as possible, used shorter synonyms, even took out the less important words in the specific product name, shortening the five-word name to two words and hoping they'd know what I meant. I was finally within the limit, but the result was two terse, brisk, business-like sentences. None of the niceties and social lubricants that usually characterize business prose, no context of why I want to know this strange factoid, no specific product names and helpful web links. It was like walking up to a stranger, unintroduced, and barking out, apropos of nothing, "Where's the subway?" without even bothering to modulate your tone to make the request sound more friendly.
Why do web sites do this on their "contact us" forms? It only hinders clarity and politeness. I realize that conciseness is nice, but so is completeness. I've had a job where I read and dealt with incoming emails, and I seriously doubt the time saved by forcing the emails to be very short would actually be significant, especially considering the time that would be wasted when the email-answerer does not understand the question properly or has to seek out further clarification. My original request was not that long - it was shorter than this blog entry - so what possible advantage could there be for companies to limit their form so tightly?
2 comments:
It is possible to exploit poorly designed web forms to overwhelm a server with huge amounts of data. So it's common practice to put limits on how much data users can submit as a security precaution. Sounds like the designer overdid it in your case, though -- there's no reason why they need to make the limit so absurdly small. =)
That's really interesting, I didn't know that. They probably neglected to user-test, so the company's web designers are all walking around smug about the uber-secure form they designed, while the customer service people are all "Wow, our customers are sure rude and abrupt and uninformative!"
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