And even more so, you liked the demonstrated success of said groove. To Yahoo: Recognize that the reason you bought Flickr in the first place was (hopefully) because you liked the groove they had going on. We know that you don’t intend to poison the well for future acquisitions and make users hate them on instinct. Yahoo, Flickr, we know you guys can do so much better than this. This, however, is not meant to be a slam as much as a cry for mercy. Flickr squandered the implicit trust I had for them by subjecting her to this cruel and unsual signup hell. She didn’t made it and ended up at 23hq instead. The only reason I dug into this issue and found these apalling before and after shots is because my lovely girlfriend tried to sign up for Flickr last night. “But only pedantic industry insiders care about all of this,” you say? Wrong. The contrast to plain English terms like “You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Flickr users” from the original agreement couldn’t be starker.
And they display it in the classic nobody-is-ever-going-to-read-this 4-line textarea. It features a terms of service agreement that sounds like it was written by nasty lawyers armed with medieval instruments of truth-extraction. It needs your first name, last name, gender, and possibly the middle name of your father. It wants to know what industry you’re in and whether you like your Yahoo content from the US or Korea. Not only is it two-and-a-half times longer, it involves sixteen questions and an opt-out cross-sell “opportunity” to get Yahoo Mail. Now consider the signup screen for Flickr after Yahoo (which in true megaplex style requires three redirects and clicking signup twice, both on Flickr and the Yahoo-Flickr site): In other words, a near perfect signup procedure. Takes no time to complete, involves little brain activity, and you get to chuckle about it. And just as importantly, they only ask three questions and a confirmation. They make jokes about the screen name, remind you that it’s changeable, express their hatred for spam, and poke fun at the terms of use.
Consider the signup screen for Flickr before Yahoo:
0 kommentar(er)
