> > robert hoekman (on the list) may be able to shed some light on why it is > the way it is. I think he did some work on it. >
Let's not jump to conclusions here. :) I want to make this perfectly clear: I had absolutely nothing to do with that site. My team worked on quite a few web apps during my stint as UX Lead, but never the site. The first week I worked at GD, I did a usability review of the homepage. They implemented some of my recommendations, ignored others, blah blah blah. That was my one and only experience with the site. It's owned by the Marketing department—you know, because "web sites are marketing tools"—and my team rarely had the opportunity to even talk to the Marketing folks. I fought long and hard to get control of the site's design handed over to the UX team, to no avail. They change the homepage every week, regardless of whether or not there's any value in doing so, and it remains cluttered and unfocused. The checkout process, as you know, is obscene. Heck, it's insulting. The site, like so many others, is a reflection of the organization that created it. Bob Parsons, founder of GD, started the company in his house/ranch in Phoenix, and basically hired his neighbor, a woman with no apparent expertise in, well, anything, to handle marketing. The company grew, and she went with it. The site was hers from day one, and remains so. Parsons never woke up in the middle of some midsummer night with the revelation that the site should be designed by actual, legitimate designers. We worked on the "value add" products—the ones that make GD most of its money beyond domain registrations. For example, I designed Metropolis, now called Hosting Connection (http://hostingmetropolis.com). And in the first two weeks of its release, it saw a higher adoption rate than anyone expected (20,000 conversions in two weeks) and received zero customer support calls. Of course, it has since been messed with in a myriad of ways and is, well, simply not as good as it once was. Keep one thing in mind when thinking about GoDaddy. The company's #1 and #2 offerings to customers are low prices and customer service, in that order. You come for the low prices, and you stay for the customer service, which is generally quite good. When I started there, I was told, unofficially, that they never wanted their products to be too good, because then no one would call in to customer support. And customer support is where all the up-sells happen. You call about a problem or to set something up and end up spending more money on other products related to what you need to do. This is how GD operates. This is why their site is so tragically bad and there is no apparent desire to improve it. In fact, of a 500-person company, at least half of the employees are call center staff. When I started designing apps that required almost no customer support, the engineering dept was ecstatic. Everyone there wanted to build good stuff, but the company was built on the backs of code-junkies and they simply didn't know how until the UX team got into the process. I was the first interaction designer ever employed there, and the first to ever work his way into the religiously developer-centric process. 95% of the design decisions made there are made by developers, most of whom have no design experience or knowledge. I did what I could. I built a team, got it wedged into the process, and left with a solid foundation in place. What has happened since then, I have no idea. But rest assured, the team I built would never allow a site that bad out the door, which is probably why we were never allowed to take control of it. -r- ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
