I can understand when things are in a public beta stage and are still going through testing, that things may not work. But, when a web application has been launched and there is no trace of ‘Beta’ or ‘testing’ anywhere on the site or service then you’d expect things to work ok and in this age of extremely competitive sites and services, it is simply unacceptable when they dont work as required.

Today, I decided that I needed some ‘Bookmark this’ buttons at the bottom of my posts as I have implemented on Skylines Australia.

So, as my blog is with Blogger, I thought there must be a widget or a pre-written piece of code out there to do it for me. I came across Sharethis and Addthis.

Sharethis
I registered at Sharethis and I filled out the form for my blogger button and I followed the prompts to put the widget on my blog and impatiently hit ‘save’, excited about this new addition, I refreshed the blog to be presented with this;

1. A new side widget with nothing in it.
2. A link underneath my posts that does nothing (because of javascript errors)
So, that was it for Sharethis. It had already wasted too much of my time.

Addthis
So the next thing to try was Addthis. Their site looked nice and to be honest, the button looked nicer and more functional than the Sharethis equivalent. So, I thought I would give it a go and register.
This was what I was presented with after registering. No disabling of the form before putting your details in, or even a nice notification page (this is all that was on the page, just some centred text). My registration still went through as gmail was quick to notify me of the successful Addthis registration.

Maybe I just need to stop being lazy. Its not a hard thing to add to the posts and it’d only take me 30mins or so to whip something up. But after these two dismal attempts at attracting me as a user on their sites, I started to think of other sites that constantly irritate me.

Shelfari
This is actually a fairly good site. I do use it and I generally like it. But their search engine is attrocious. What respectful web site in the 21st century has a crap search? None. Searching and indexing has advanced so much in the past 10 years that there is simply no excuse for bad search engines. This site constantly makes me use the advanced search to put everything in to find a book. eg. Searching for ‘A year in tibet’ gives me a crap load of books, mainly about the lord of the rings. But if I go to the advanced search and put in the title and author, I get the book I was searching for which has the exact name I was searching for. Not to mention on  this site how you can mark a book as ‘Plan to read’ and then next time you come back, its set to ‘Already read’ and ‘I own this book’… Not sure what happens between visits but I dont read that quickly.

Blackout Rugby
This site is a great online Rugby game. FYI, I love rugby. I bought a team-signed Waratahs jersey on Saturday night. Thats beside the point. This game is great, but lacks the finesse of something with more time under its belt. For example, up until a few months ago, the site used a flash-only navigation. This meant that if I logged in on my 64Bit Fedora machine (with no flash support), I had to try to guess the URL of the pages I wanted, which also lead me to a big fat SQL error (and likely, an injection opportunity which I promptly notified them about). They have now implemented a fall back navigation menu for no flash support. The other area this site falls over is in stability. The site has been down so much over the past month (maybe 5 days at least) due to them moving hosts twice. When you are charging money for a ‘premium’ membership, this is simply not good enough. You cannot expect to grow your user base when you take usability so lightly.

In conclusion
Web site owners and operators need to realise that if their product does not work, they will lose their users. It is that simple. If something doesn’t work, the user will go elsewhere. If something isn’t accessible, the user will go elsewhere. If something is too complicated, the user will go elsewhere. With the level of competition and new-and-improved up-and-comers in all areas of the internet, its never been more important to ensure that your service works. Even if it means removing functionality to ensure that the core of the system is as bug-free as possible. Or just stamp a ‘Beta’ on it.

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