Inadvertently Creating The Wrong Expectations

Posted by Whitney on 10/29/07 in Technical writing

Over the summer, my friend invited me to join her food blog as a guest author so I could write about my explorations as a newly re-minted tea junkie. It seemed easy enough — just click on the link in the e-mail sent by Blogger and 1-2-3, ready to write.

The page I landed on was reasonable enough. In order to blog for her, I would have to set up a Google account — “Don’t have a Google Account? Create your account now.” I’d seen a similar step over on TypePad when an acquaintance asked me to contribute to his blog.

When I clicked on the “Create your account now” link, I was taken to the Create a Google Account page. I figured I was just signing up for a simple user ID and password. But the top of the page showed the three steps of the process I was about to start:

Create Account
Name Blog
Choose Template

I stopped my registration process and began searching through the limited online help. Why? Because those steps at the top of the screen gave me the impression that I had to set up a blog on Blogger just to guest-author for Carolyn. (I don’t need another blog, I already write here and here.) It wasn’t unreasonable to interpret things this way; I’d nixed LiveJournal earlier in the year as a possibility for an internal, secure “bulletin board” for the board members of the animal rescue because it made writers go through the hassle of setting up a blog template and URL just to write for someone else’s blog.

Nowhere on Blogger could I find the answer I wanted — could I skip Steps 2 and 3 in the registration process? After four days, I found the answer — Yes — through an acquaintance on a listserv, someone who’d had the same confusion when he was invited to be a substitute for another blogger.

In the scheme of things, I suppose it was a simple misunderstanding. But it was unnecessary. It wasn’t intuitive, and I wasted time looking for the answer. If the steps couldn’t be removed from the top of the page (they are useful for people who want a blog on Blogger), the folks at Blogger could have done a better job of documenting that one could get a user ID and password without a blog.

How many other people were confused by the same page? How much time did they waste looking for answers? How much total time was lost because someone didn’t take 10 minutes to write a short bit of documentation and send it to the Webmaster (or whoever manages the updates to these pages).

Or am I being unreasonable? Cranky?

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4 comments for this post.

Tumerica Said:
October 31st, 2007 at 9:07 pm
100% reasonable and understandable. That sort of thing drives me crazy too. It’s unconscionable to waste people’s time like that through sheer laziness on the part of the company to either hire a tech writer to write up the procedures or hiring a tech writer who isn’t doing a good job. Either way, just because a service is free doesn’t mean it has to be shoddy in its Help. Arrrgggghhhh!
Whitney Said:
November 1st, 2007 at 2:35 am
>>”just because a service is free doesn’t mean it has to be shoddy in its help.”

So true.

Given the funky things we’ve seen happen in recent weeks with fonts and line spacing in posts, should we be surprised that the help is lacking when the most basic functionality in the app itself isn’t consistently behaving as it should?
Rhonda Said:
November 6th, 2007 at 8:48 am
So how *do* you comment without signing up for a blog? I have a Google account and whenever I go to comment on a Blogger post, it already knows who I am even if I’ve never posted on that blog before.

Like you, I have my own blog and I don’t want another one. And like you, it p***es me off to have to register for something they say is ‘free’. If it’s free, let me have it. Ask me to register and I’m outta there. Unless I REALLY REALLY want it. I’ve had ‘discussions’ with clients on this - “Oh, can we have a registration form so we know who’s getting the ?” “But they can type in Mickey Mouse and still get it. So why do you want this again?”
Whitney Said:
November 9th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Maybe there’s a cookie or whatnot somewhere on your PC for your Google account?

I’ve run into several blogs on Blogger that don’t provide an “Other” option for folks who don’t have Google or old Blogger accounts. In a couple of cases I e-mailed the author telling them they were likely driving off readers (both had published posts in which they bemoaned the lack of comments). One woman didn’t realize commenting was set up that way on her blog; one man set it without realizing the impact it would have.

It’s irritating how much stuff has to be registered for. I have so many user IDs and passwords to keep up with it’s unreasonable. You try to keep things simple enough to remember, difficult to hack, and varied enough that if someone snatches one ID and password they don’t have the “key” to get into everything of yours.

Echoing your comment…If it’s free, let me have it.