Juicy Offer, Stupid Questions
Some of the forms on our web sites drive me nuts. For instance, there's a great free trial now now for the hot new Sun Fire T2000 servers where Sun will actually ship you a system to try for 60 days. But, two of the questions on the first page are these:
Are these really necessary? Let me give you a hint: If you are doing anything on the web, the answer for the form is YES, YES to both questions. For instance, you could download the no-charge Java Enterprise System Web Instrastructure Suite and run it on the trial T2000 system and have a screaming fast web server setup to play with for 60 days without spending a dollar. As our engineering chief Will Snow has previously mentioned, we're using the T2000s on a number of our sites already, and they're blindingly fast for web, crawling, and database operations.
So, what's with the questions? Usually, extra questions are created by marketing or legal departments who want to collect "just one more piece of info." Get 10 or 15 cooks in the kitchen, and you'll end up with excruciatingly long forms. In the case above, you could imagine the questions being eliminated with a simple statement in the intro at the top of the form.
There are indeed some necessary questions to ask (like, on these forms, what kind of system should we send you? and where should we ship it?) and I like how we've split the necessary questions into a few logical steps. But I bet we could knock our four or more questions if we put our minds to it.
I see unneccessary questions all over web. Sometimes, like with this one, the form might be worth the trouble even if you have to click through some questions. But we web folks everywhere should fight hard to keep our forms short and simple, even if it means battling 15 cooks armed with spatulas and wooden spoons.
Tunes: MCR:
Pressure
P.S. Ummm... funny, when we write ads and we only have a tiny space, we keep things really simple:
