I thought this this was just going to be about over complicated forms that scare people away.
Back when I was doing client work for a small agency we would get requests for these contact forms that would have 30+ fields, often many of them required. The forms made strong assumptions about why you were contacting them, and if you did not fit that mold the form was particularly painful.
No one wants to take the time to fill this out, you are losing business.
I would always try to talk them into simplifying. All anyone really needed was Name + Email + Text Area but many were insistent and many of these nightmare forms got built. I genuinely wish I had stats on how many people landed on the forms vs actually filled it out.
The worst part was that the vast majority of these just converted into emails to the owner of the small company with no backing database, because we charged extra for that. You'd spend all that time filling out all those fields and they would get concatenated back into a single string (with new lines and field titles).
I'm reminded of this when I try to submit an issue on some of these GitHub repos with wildly overdone templates. I just want to let you know you have a broken link in your documentation but you're forcing me to fill in my OS and build version and last time I went to the dentist and sign a CLA... and I've just not bothered more than a few times. Enjoy your broken link.
The latter is a byproduct of how GitHub's upperhanding[1]/casting couch culture has overtaken the Web community and how a bunch of software gets built, generally. The Shirky era[2] is gone. You're not seen or to be treated as a neighbor showing up with a helpful tip that one of your pipes has burst. You're going to be seen as another person who wants something from them, or, at best, a starlet who can do something for the cigar champers and'll be willing to put up with a lot of crap because you're trying to build a résumé.
This in large part because of two design decisions that GitHub made early on: the contribution graph on profile pages and naming the bugtracker "GitHub Issues" (and promoting a culture where people with support requests are funneled into the same side door as collaborators trying to keep tabs on software defects—i.e. people who need a real bugtracker).
I really tried to get it on my own, but please, what is the connection between the Seinfeld Episode "The Pez Dispenser" and the "Casting Couch Culture of GitHub"?
Suppose we are a design agency which build merchandise shops for sports teams. We have specific market knowledge, research, and experience in tailoring these shops to improve the experience for sports fans.
Out of the blue, a logistics company contacts us to help them build a merchandise shop. Could we do this? Sure, but it would require a lot of upfront work and given that it's not our area of expertise could possible result in a subpar experience for both us and the logistics company.
Given such, it's reasonable disqualify such clients. We can do this through our sales process, but by adding a simple "painful" field (e.g., "What sport does your team play?") you encourage such clients to disqualify themselves.
It saves us the work and effort. And it means the clients who get through the form are more likely to be the type of client we want.
There will always be a balance because our ideal clients will always be vaguely defined to some extent. This means some legit clients might get disqualify unnecessarily (e.g., a lacrosse team because we didn't think to include that in the list of sports), but it also means the quality of leads and/or inquiries which come through the forms would be higher quality.
Sure, if you have too much business that you can't be bothered to check these other leads. Same for browser incompatibility: you end up with a form which demands no blocking of anything, many specific js capabilities, MSIE only (I kid - you would think), etc, etc. Each incompatibility might only concern 2% of the population, but the whole mess mostly works flawlessly on the CEO's computer.
A single qualifying question like "What sport does your team play?" is a good direction - instead of the data fetishism of these forms.
"You will get less leads with the 'enterprise style' contact page. You don't have enough leads right now. You don't have low value self-serve users you want to turn away. Your BDR team is not overflowing with leads you need to turn away. You can make money from having more leads. Less leads will generate less revenue. Here are some potential metrics from the two styles of contact pages. Here is how these metrics tie into revenue."
I think an honest message like this, at least communicated via email to the budget owners would abscond... or at least absolve one of any guilt.
Also, thank you for having the option to toggle the font. I wrote a css rule, but found it later.
I think the last point combined with some real data or case studies would prompt introspection.
Anecdotally I stick to companies with good customer support like glue, even if their product is inferior. It's an absolute wonder to be taken seriously by a company, to have feedback integrated into future products, or just have small issues taken care of without hassle.
You're going to laugh, but this is why I stick with AWS. They've twice helped me with billing issues on my personal account - as in an actual human helping me. They have no idea I manage large (not huge) AWS deployments at my day job. They just demonstrate great customer service to me as a small client.
So they have me as a loyal customer. And advocate, it seems.
I don’t think the person you’re replying to is suggesting literally that exact message, but something like it. Adapt to your client and the type of relationship you have with them. You can transmit that same message with a different tone.
You have to judge it client by client though. Some are amenable to and grateful for a flatly stated analysis and recommendation, even if it goes against their ideas. Some will feel belittled and undermined. You need both sorts to pay their invoices and refer their peers, so you pick your battles.
This has always frustrated me. You wouldn't go to a doctor, hear that you need an appendix removed, and feel "belittled and undermined"!
The 'problem' (it's a problem from my pov) is that clients simply think they know better when it comes to digital/computer/online stuff. They're used to browsing the web, so they think they know what a good website is. They know how to write a letter in MS Word, so they think they can write good web copy. Etc.
Actually, the default font is much more pleasant than that used on this site (https://lenowo.org/index.php) which I complained about a few days ago - and that site doesn't have an option to make it more readable as far as I can see...
Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.
No kidding! Half way down I began to get a headache. Took me a moment to understand that it was the difficult-to-read font that was inducing headache. Switched to "Reader mode" and instant relief!
Excellent design. But not for me. Thank you Reader mode!
I also admired this and for a moment thought "I should steal this person's style". Then I quickly realised I am not even close to capable of pulling a design like that off, on so many dimensions.
I guess that's why this person is a professional designer and I'm a person who's never worked on a product with a UI in his career!
I hated it. It looks really pretty, but was terrible for reading. Half my phone screen was taken up by icons, and there was no scrollbar so I had no idea how long the article was. I really needed reader mode for it.
It has broken scrolling, very irritating. Scroll to top doesn’t work at all and when I fiddle with the fake windows regular scrolling can’t decide if the fake window or the whole page should scroll.
Urgh... One of the worst things, when you want to contact someone and they have hidden every means of doing so. It reflects badly on the companies that do this and questions why such pages exist to begin with. I understand why companies hate spam, but when a company hides customer service, that should be a major red flag and reeks of cowardice. Customers can and do have major problems, not just Karen type issues, but being ripped off for hundreds or even thousands. They sometimes hide behind underpaid staff who are students or can barely speak English.
It's all dependent entirely on scale. If a bajillion customers have major problems (whether actually major or in their mind), you have to triage and the first tier won't be experts with excellent command of English. Support is fucking expensive. Everyone wants bespoke service, but if you are not a customer, or if the amount of business you bring does not justify the expense, the support level you want cannot be provided in the long run.
Yes, Faecebook is one of the worst. I hate companies that blether on about community guidelines but refuse to say how you violated them. (Which in some cases may be an error.)
The worst part is big corporations are starting to do this internally too to push down ticket volumes. Filing a ticket has become a traumatic journey in itself. Phone? Even worse that has a voice chatbot!
As someone that works on this space, with the kind of products that want this kind of contact pages, they forgot to mention that even behind login walls, in some products you only get to create a support ticket if there are enough developers with the right level of certifications and partnership.
One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card
That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.
Hetzner team if you are reading this, although I love email platform, is there any way that your support stops being AI (which annoyed me) but rather you can have an discord,matrix (preferred),telegram, heck IRC or even slack for what its worth where I can message the team if I wanted a custom solution on top of hetzner etc.
Fwiw, Upcloud provided support and heard me out even if I didnt share my credit card info so massive respects to them and I am sure that my experience with hetzner has always been positive (they responded to me once on hackernews which was peak) but maybe if they are reading this (then hello!) and yea, please hetzner I hope you change your contact page to be more suitable or hear my complaints as I like hetzner a lot too
Personally, I am starting to value contact support which I thought didn't matter a lot nowadays. It doesn't matter if its cheap or not but rather if I can talk to their team once about any product and see if I can match their terms of service and similar basically or other issues in general too.
Also Hetzner, another point, I would love to be able to write articles for you and get the 50$ (I will read it again to see if I can "write" according to the conditions but yea) and similar but once again I need a hetzner account which required credit card/debit card validation.
Hi there, First, we are currently in the process of unifying our user interfaces, so it is helpful to get feedback like this.
We do have an AI chatbot on our website because that tends to work well for most basic sales questions. Depending on the questions it gets, it will also steer users to other ways of reaching out to us. We have a contact form for Custom Solutions, and real humans answer those. https://www.hetzner.com/custom-solutions/ The same is true for general sales tickets that go here: https://www.hetzner.com/support-form/ You do not need to already be a customer, or give us your credit card info, to use those two forms.
The reasons we steer our people who are already customers to use their account: 1) We can protect their data better there. 2) We can send the question to the right queue/team more easily. 3) We can quickly ask follow-up questions.
The credit card information on new accounts is a step to prevent abuse and fraud. Depending on a user's location, once they create an account, they will likely have other billing options and they may change depending on their location.
There are certain aspects of other platforms that make it a bit easier for companies to respond to customers/readers. We actually try really hard not to fish here on HN, and therefore only really respond if someone mentions us directly or if I see incorrect/misleading information. I imagine it is the same with other providers. --Katie
> One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card
> That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.
In one word: fraud. I've worked at a company similar to Hetzner, and the "add a credit card first" is the single most effective way to weed out 99% of abusers. People that will each up swaths of compute and mine crypto, ruining the service for everyone. Or hosting CSAM material. Or participating in botnets. Or sending spam. All those makes both the company AND the clients suffer.
You still get the occasional Pakistani bank that allows the emission of unlimited credit cards for fraudsters or the stolen cards (stripe goes a long way for this), but it simply makes the business bearable.
So yeah, we were not thrilled to enforce CC for signup. Believe it or not, even marketing or sales hated it, because it introduces friction in the signup tunnel.
As to re: logged in to open tickets, it is a necessity to avoid customer getting their account stolen. As a customer you receive fake "change your password now!" emails, as a company you receive fake "i've lost my password!" emails. That's the sad way the world is right now. Account theft for hosting providers is a real thing, because the stakes can be very very high.
As always, I was writing a comment to another comment and thought that it might be relevant to create a new (top?) comment itself too (sorry if its "plagiarism")
But basically one other type of such contact pages are when a company has such a contact page + it only works for customers who have logged in and they can only login entirely if they give their credit/debit card info.
I found it to be the case for hetzner,contabo basically. OVH had a discord server which I could join to ask some basic inqueries/support, I never understand the companies which do not have any such things like discord,telegram etc.
In an ideal world I would want them to run matrix or open source but even if they are on discord, it can be light years ahead of the contact page they have right now which I simply don't understand.
I wish to be more anonymous with my credit/debit card info, I recently went into nerding about vps providers basically and signing up via crypto for all its hate was something I enjoyed. (Funny how I linked my previous crypto comments to this contact page idea)
I think ignorance can play a deal in it. I don't think all companies do it out of malice as the article points out, some do it by ignorance. So in a way, Kudos for raising awareness about it.
Funny you mention OVH, their direct competitor Scaleway have a public Community slack open to anyone too. Even the engineers directly making the products can be pinged there, so it's great. But re: my comment, AFAIK they receive quite a bit of fake "I lost my account" inquiries.
I've seen the behind the scenes, and in the case of hosting companies, it is self-defense rather than malice. Even some high-stakes SaaS it might be justified too. Though I agree that such restrictions are just user hostile in most cases.
This whole post is coming of a bit naive to me... I highly doubt this client is just an inspirational design meeting away from changing their offering and make a massive investment in customer support. I also don't get why a web-development consultant would feel so responsible for a pretty typical business decision.
> I also don't get why a web-development consultant would feel so responsible for a pretty typical business decision by their client.
Because they are an expert in their field and the client, presumably, isn't? I can't imagine another field—hairdressing, construction, financial advice—where the client would reject the paid expert's viewpoint so readily and firmly.
Its bikeshedding - they can see it so they have an opinion on it. I think it happens in many fields where the output is visual - photography, advertising,.....
There is also a general feeling that websites are primarily about design (rather than development) and that the design is aesthetic (rather than UI).
> I can't imagine another field—hairdressing, construction, financial advice
For financial advice, maybe not as readily, but it definitely happens pretty firmly. Lots of people have lost money taking risks they have been warned about. A lot during booms because of FOMO, and a lot because people do not even take advice in the first place.
But honestly, they are more likely to NOT be experts in the business of the client. They are experts on tech, their own business and aesthetic.
People come to hairdressers with own ideas about how their hair should look like and reject hairdressers advice. In fact, hairdressers are not even trying to give you advice unless you explicitly ask for it. They sometimes makes mild suggestions and offers, but that is it.
Frankly, financial advisors are more likely to give advice designed to max out their bonuses rather then one good for you. You probably should firmly reject that financial product or flat tire insurance.
The expertise offered here is "how to build a website". If the client is insisting that the dev use a specific javascript library, that would be odd.
The client here is just requesting specific content on their website, similar to someone requesting a granite countertop in their kitchen; that seems fine, even if its not particularly classy or aesthetically pleasing to the contractor.
I doubt the client is wanting to make a massive investment in customer support, but they're probably also not wanting to be actively hostile to anyone who wants that support. It wouldn't surprise me if the client's older support page was little more than a phone number and/or an email address, and the only reason they moved away from that is because of spam. Maybe they're another step removed from that again, but they're not the 16 steps removed that the Fuck Off page is.
If the client's intent is to provide as little support as possible, that would probably have come up during the conversation where they said they wanted that design, but it seems that they like that design for other reasons (it's a decent way to seem bigger than you actually are, seems more professional maybe?).
There is an underlying point in general, but it seems like the author has got hung up over the words "talk to our sales team" and wants to ditch the whole design and go to something with less function as a result.
If I was hiring them I might well start ignoring them at this point as well - thy are literally proposing only implementing only one of the three methods, and the most simple one at that.
I assume I've determined that customers want ready access to some questions. I assume that I have a physical location customers want to see.
Proposing to ditch these is preposterous. I could see proposing inlining the contract form. I could see using more neutral terms ('get in touch' vs 'contract our sales team').
If you're a web dev who has had past clients not pay up due to going broke/cashflow issues, then you have a bit of vested interest in seeing them succeed (and then pay you properly).
They explained it. It goes against the client's goals. Massive investment in customer support? It's about generating leads. I think you're seen it as a SaaS offering which the writer has mentioned multiple times, isn't the case for the client.
Readit News
Back when I was doing client work for a small agency we would get requests for these contact forms that would have 30+ fields, often many of them required. The forms made strong assumptions about why you were contacting them, and if you did not fit that mold the form was particularly painful.
No one wants to take the time to fill this out, you are losing business.
I would always try to talk them into simplifying. All anyone really needed was Name + Email + Text Area but many were insistent and many of these nightmare forms got built. I genuinely wish I had stats on how many people landed on the forms vs actually filled it out.
The worst part was that the vast majority of these just converted into emails to the owner of the small company with no backing database, because we charged extra for that. You'd spend all that time filling out all those fields and they would get concatenated back into a single string (with new lines and field titles).
I'm reminded of this when I try to submit an issue on some of these GitHub repos with wildly overdone templates. I just want to let you know you have a broken link in your documentation but you're forcing me to fill in my OS and build version and last time I went to the dentist and sign a CLA... and I've just not bothered more than a few times. Enjoy your broken link.
This in large part because of two design decisions that GitHub made early on: the contribution graph on profile pages and naming the bugtracker "GitHub Issues" (and promoting a culture where people with support requests are funneled into the same side door as collaborators trying to keep tabs on software defects—i.e. people who need a real bugtracker).
1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pez_Dispenser>
2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody_(book)>
Suppose we are a design agency which build merchandise shops for sports teams. We have specific market knowledge, research, and experience in tailoring these shops to improve the experience for sports fans.
Out of the blue, a logistics company contacts us to help them build a merchandise shop. Could we do this? Sure, but it would require a lot of upfront work and given that it's not our area of expertise could possible result in a subpar experience for both us and the logistics company.
Given such, it's reasonable disqualify such clients. We can do this through our sales process, but by adding a simple "painful" field (e.g., "What sport does your team play?") you encourage such clients to disqualify themselves.
It saves us the work and effort. And it means the clients who get through the form are more likely to be the type of client we want.
There will always be a balance because our ideal clients will always be vaguely defined to some extent. This means some legit clients might get disqualify unnecessarily (e.g., a lacrosse team because we didn't think to include that in the list of sports), but it also means the quality of leads and/or inquiries which come through the forms would be higher quality.
A single qualifying question like "What sport does your team play?" is a good direction - instead of the data fetishism of these forms.
Deleted Comment
I think an honest message like this, at least communicated via email to the budget owners would abscond... or at least absolve one of any guilt.
Also, thank you for having the option to toggle the font. I wrote a css rule, but found it later.
Anecdotally I stick to companies with good customer support like glue, even if their product is inferior. It's an absolute wonder to be taken seriously by a company, to have feedback integrated into future products, or just have small issues taken care of without hassle.
So they have me as a loyal customer. And advocate, it seems.
This has always frustrated me. You wouldn't go to a doctor, hear that you need an appendix removed, and feel "belittled and undermined"!
The 'problem' (it's a problem from my pov) is that clients simply think they know better when it comes to digital/computer/online stuff. They're used to browsing the web, so they think they know what a good website is. They know how to write a letter in MS Word, so they think they can write good web copy. Etc.
(Very few sites have this feature, so the one in question gets big bonus points from me)
Excellent design. But not for me. Thank you Reader mode!
I guess that's why this person is a professional designer and I'm a person who's never worked on a product with a UI in his career!
Dead Comment
https://i.imgur.com/Om4u0lW.png
Is it really "terrible for reading"?... I find this very comfortable, to the contrary...
https://www.nicchan.me/art/
Here's your Facebook page to talk to all of your friends. Oh, you got banned? TOO BAD
Deleted Comment
Insane way of doing business yet here we are
That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.
Hetzner team if you are reading this, although I love email platform, is there any way that your support stops being AI (which annoyed me) but rather you can have an discord,matrix (preferred),telegram, heck IRC or even slack for what its worth where I can message the team if I wanted a custom solution on top of hetzner etc.
Fwiw, Upcloud provided support and heard me out even if I didnt share my credit card info so massive respects to them and I am sure that my experience with hetzner has always been positive (they responded to me once on hackernews which was peak) but maybe if they are reading this (then hello!) and yea, please hetzner I hope you change your contact page to be more suitable or hear my complaints as I like hetzner a lot too
Personally, I am starting to value contact support which I thought didn't matter a lot nowadays. It doesn't matter if its cheap or not but rather if I can talk to their team once about any product and see if I can match their terms of service and similar basically or other issues in general too.
Also Hetzner, another point, I would love to be able to write articles for you and get the 50$ (I will read it again to see if I can "write" according to the conditions but yea) and similar but once again I need a hetzner account which required credit card/debit card validation.
> That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.
In one word: fraud. I've worked at a company similar to Hetzner, and the "add a credit card first" is the single most effective way to weed out 99% of abusers. People that will each up swaths of compute and mine crypto, ruining the service for everyone. Or hosting CSAM material. Or participating in botnets. Or sending spam. All those makes both the company AND the clients suffer.
You still get the occasional Pakistani bank that allows the emission of unlimited credit cards for fraudsters or the stolen cards (stripe goes a long way for this), but it simply makes the business bearable.
So yeah, we were not thrilled to enforce CC for signup. Believe it or not, even marketing or sales hated it, because it introduces friction in the signup tunnel.
As to re: logged in to open tickets, it is a necessity to avoid customer getting their account stolen. As a customer you receive fake "change your password now!" emails, as a company you receive fake "i've lost my password!" emails. That's the sad way the world is right now. Account theft for hosting providers is a real thing, because the stakes can be very very high.
But basically one other type of such contact pages are when a company has such a contact page + it only works for customers who have logged in and they can only login entirely if they give their credit/debit card info.
I found it to be the case for hetzner,contabo basically. OVH had a discord server which I could join to ask some basic inqueries/support, I never understand the companies which do not have any such things like discord,telegram etc.
In an ideal world I would want them to run matrix or open source but even if they are on discord, it can be light years ahead of the contact page they have right now which I simply don't understand.
I wish to be more anonymous with my credit/debit card info, I recently went into nerding about vps providers basically and signing up via crypto for all its hate was something I enjoyed. (Funny how I linked my previous crypto comments to this contact page idea)
I think ignorance can play a deal in it. I don't think all companies do it out of malice as the article points out, some do it by ignorance. So in a way, Kudos for raising awareness about it.
Funny you mention OVH, their direct competitor Scaleway have a public Community slack open to anyone too. Even the engineers directly making the products can be pinged there, so it's great. But re: my comment, AFAIK they receive quite a bit of fake "I lost my account" inquiries.
I've seen the behind the scenes, and in the case of hosting companies, it is self-defense rather than malice. Even some high-stakes SaaS it might be justified too. Though I agree that such restrictions are just user hostile in most cases.
Because they are an expert in their field and the client, presumably, isn't? I can't imagine another field—hairdressing, construction, financial advice—where the client would reject the paid expert's viewpoint so readily and firmly.
There is also a general feeling that websites are primarily about design (rather than development) and that the design is aesthetic (rather than UI).
> I can't imagine another field—hairdressing, construction, financial advice
For financial advice, maybe not as readily, but it definitely happens pretty firmly. Lots of people have lost money taking risks they have been warned about. A lot during booms because of FOMO, and a lot because people do not even take advice in the first place.
People come to hairdressers with own ideas about how their hair should look like and reject hairdressers advice. In fact, hairdressers are not even trying to give you advice unless you explicitly ask for it. They sometimes makes mild suggestions and offers, but that is it.
Frankly, financial advisors are more likely to give advice designed to max out their bonuses rather then one good for you. You probably should firmly reject that financial product or flat tire insurance.
The client here is just requesting specific content on their website, similar to someone requesting a granite countertop in their kitchen; that seems fine, even if its not particularly classy or aesthetically pleasing to the contractor.
If the client's intent is to provide as little support as possible, that would probably have come up during the conversation where they said they wanted that design, but it seems that they like that design for other reasons (it's a decent way to seem bigger than you actually are, seems more professional maybe?).
If I was hiring them I might well start ignoring them at this point as well - thy are literally proposing only implementing only one of the three methods, and the most simple one at that.
I assume I've determined that customers want ready access to some questions. I assume that I have a physical location customers want to see.
Proposing to ditch these is preposterous. I could see proposing inlining the contract form. I could see using more neutral terms ('get in touch' vs 'contract our sales team').