Not exactly a usability post. But still worth a chortle. Or maybe a guffaw. OK, how about a titter? No? Alrighty then.
And while we’re talking Amazon.com, I need to post someday soon about how fantastically great Amazon’s “Amazon Recommends” marketing emails are. They rope me in more than I’d like to admit. Why? Because they’re just so damn accurate.
Amazon has clearly done the hard work of tuning their recommendation engine.
And when you get down to it showing me stuff I’m likely to want is the critical difference between spam and email I want to actually read.
So I was looking for a good price on a little Honda I’m interested in. I stumbled across a site that pings all the dealers in my vicinity for their best price.
One thing I do when I’m not sure of how trustworthy a site is…is use my initials instead of my first name. And usually I accompany it with “plus” addressing, which is simply a way to identify if an organization is selling your email address to third parties. You put “pjsherman+[something else]@gmail.com”, and Gmail will still deliver it to your base address. If you start receiving spam at that address, then you know that the company sold your address. And, you can easily block it.
So I fill out the form, and enter “PJ” – short for Paul Joseph – into the first name field.
And the form barfs. Plus, it gets all scoldy with its CAPITALIZATION of CONTACT and VALID. In my head it sounds like a smarmy schoolteacher.
Then I got curious and entered in some variations to see if the form would accept certain two-letter first names.
Nope.
So the upshot is…if you’re Bo or Al or Ty or Jo, this company isn’t interested in your business.
