Do you like being told what to do? I haven’t met a person yet that likes it when conditions are forced on them. Yet some companies deliberately choose a browser and then create their website to work with that browser.
Who are they trying to please?
Now granted, it’s much easier to write an interactive program if I only have to worry about a single browser. It makes the developer’s life much easier. It reduces the testing cycle. It gives you more predictability.
Which is great for the development team, but lousy for some of the company’s customer and prospects.
Don’t annoy web visitors
I ran into the annoyance of a dictated platform today. Like so many others I wanted to find out if I could save money on my mortgage. So I went out to the GMAC Mortgage website and went to the page where I could check rates.
With visions of a paid-off house in my head, I typed in all the information on the form and clicked the submit button. Then I waited…. and waited….. and waited….. I opened a new tab in my browser and went to do some other things while I waited.
Two minutes later I still had an in-progress window on the screen. That was when I noticed the fine print at the bottom of the form:
This site utilizes features optimized for Internet Explorer 6.x or higher.
Why tick off 55% of internet users?
According to W3Counter only 44% of web users use Internet Explorer. So why would GMAC Mortgage deliberately ignore the other 55% of the internet population? The same statistics page shows Firefox as the next most-popular browser, with 31% of the users.
Well, I’m part of that 31%. By choosing Internet Explorer as their platform of choice, GMAC Mortgage may be losing 31% of its mortgage leads. Now granted, some folks may be eager enough to refinance with them that they’ll close down their trusty Firefox and open up IE instead, just so they can see the rates. But how many people will just go to another site instead? And how many will instead call the toll-free number, thereby costing GMAC more money to handle the inquiry?
A website page is never done
Since the rate inquiry form says the page is optimized for IE6 and above, it’s possible that the page was originally built before Firefox gained so much popularity. Then, as often happens with software projects, the project was marked Complete, the team had other projects to move on to, and the page was never revisited as browser popularity changed.
What’s a program manager to do?
The reality is that there is never enough time and money to maintain every page and fix every bug. Priorities dictate which annoyances are left alone.
But even if GMAC Mortgage doesn’t have the resources to fix the entire page, they can at least put in a quick browser check when the page first loads. And if the visitor doesn’t happen to be using IE6 or later, why not warn the visitor right away that the form may not function properly? It would at least be a little better than having them click the Submit button and get annoyed with the long wait.
