usability fails are everywhere and it’s sad.
In: Uncategorized
1 Jun 2009Humans are lazy. We are incredibly lazy. So lazy, in fact, that we are reluctant to type those four extra characters: www.
http://indiana.edu takes you to this:

http://www.indiana.edu takes you to this:

It’s kind of like how http://lib.msu.edu doesn’t load and http://www.lib.msu.edu automatically forwards you to http://www2.lib.msu.edu. Don’t ignore your type-in market, dudes, especially if you’re a site that isn’t likely to have as much search engine traffic after the first time they find it, like an university or an oft-used resource.
My name is Leanna Gingras and I'm a graduate student at the University of Michigan's School of Information. My main vice is angry muttering. Instead of angrily muttering to myself whenever I encounter an astonishingly ineptly-designed object, I will mutter about it here and you can read it and we can angrily mutter together. I'll also be posting about stuff I do, links I think are nifty, and places I go.
2 Responses to Indiana FAIL
Tijmen Smit
June 1st, 2009 at 6:33 pm
This is one of the things that really annoys me sometimes. You think you tried the wrong url since it didn’t work, only seconds later you realize that just adding the www would fix it.
I know of a website from a big international company that receives 1500+ visitors a day, but the version without the www just doesn’t work.
I told them of the problem several times almost a year ago, but the still haven’t fixed it.
Zach
June 9th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
I always wondered about this myself. I always type the URL, virtually never use bookmarks. I also generally still type http://. I don’t know why…