A project I’m currently leading involves setting up a management portal on our intranet.
To that end I need to do a number of card sorting exercises with a variety of users to see how best to organize the big list of resources we’ve come up with.
I’ve been looking at card sorting tools to make the process easier (I’m tired of doing it by hand) and even if there are web-based ones that would enable me to run these remotely (see more on “remote usability testing”:https://smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000270.php).
Anyway, within this area is a suite of products by the name of “UserZoom”:http://www.userzoom.com. To quote:
bq. UserZoom offers a wide variety of remote usability and user experience testing products to suit your needs.
Great! I have some needs — affordable and easy to use.
UserZoom has an “online card sorting tool”:http://www.userzoom.com/remote_usability_testing_products.asp?ap=62 which looks quite promising. However, there’s one big problem with the product — I have no idea how to buy it! Or, even if I can.
The web site has some fairly informative pages about what the product is and how it works (although the couple of screenshots provided are blurry and small), but nowhere is there a link to actually buy the product or even a way to contact a sales representative.
Of course, it goes without saying that there is no pricing information — one of my pet peeves as a potential customer.
I’m obviously missing something really obvious, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what I’m supposed to do next — there is absolutely no call to action on the product pages.
Not to pick on them, but it’s especially ironic that this usability issue is present on a site that sells usability products and services.
*Sidenote:* an interesting side-effect of my experience using this site is that it actually makes me feel inadequate as a user.
Despite knowing — as a practitioner of user-experience design — that it is not the user’s fault if they can’t use your web site, I can’t help but feel a little stupid that I can’t work out what to do.
I mean, surely everyone got it right away, right?
This was so ironic I had to go check it out myself! They don’t give you any clues but they do have a “contact” link in the top right corner — which reveals that they are based in Spain and have a number to call for US sales reps.
Hope their software tools are a little easier to use than their website. Good luck!
Good example of weak call to action. I did pick up on the contact link straight away but I’m tuned to find these things, most users won’t be.
Not good enough considering who they are.
I saw the ‘contact’ link as well, but thought that they couldn’t possibly be using it as the main way for someone to follow up if they were interested in purchasing a product.
Guess I was wrong!