Here’s a usability boink that irritated me this morning.
I was renewing a domain at GoDaddy. I added it to my cart and clicked “continue.” After what seemed like a dozen screens of “Buy This Too,” GoDaddy showed me a list of five domains I had with them that were coming close to expiration — they were all checked to “Add to Cart.” The original domain I was renewing was in there too.
This was pretty handy because I found another one that I needed to renew. So I unchecked three of them, and left the original domain (the one I came to renew in the first place), and the other domain I had just noticed, checked.
Then I got this:
You see, the original domain was already in my cart, and then it was checked in the “handy” list of domains “nearing expiration” too. So I tried to put it in my cart twice.
Two annoyances here:
If I can’t put the domain in my cart, why are you showing it to me in the first place? To not throw an error here, I had to uncheck the original domain I came to renew in that list, and that’s just completely counterintuitive.
If I try to add the same domain to my cart twice, why not just disregard the second attempt? This isn’t like a sporting goods store where I could actually buy two footballs. A domain name is a unique thing, so a second attempt to add it to my cart is obviously a mistake (one that you tricked me into, I might add).
This just tweaked me this morning. You’d think GoDaddy would have more sense. Maybe that chick from the commercials should be their usability tester. If she can figure it out…
I switched to godaddy before there big promotional push. I was a dedicated Dotster user until they removed their telephone number and did not return any of 3 emails I sent to their customer support. Since switching to GoDaddy I have been moving my expiring domains from Dotster. By the end of the year I will have moved over 50 domains. I really enjoyed Dotster but GoDaddy has them and everyone else, IMHO, on price and especially customer support. GoDaddy has excellent email and telephone support, at least they did before the ad campaigns.
I hope they keep it up. I agree about the annoyance factor. I don't care about the 50 add-on's they continue to offer during checkout. Sometimes when I register a new domain it has a radio select to bypass those screens but not always.
Anyway. I wanted to share my experience. So I don't get yelled at for being an ad. I was a Dotster reseller and I am now a GoDaddy reseller. The URL listed on this post is my GoDaddy reseller account.
Customer support? Well.. They did get back to me when promised, however, they blew me off because I use Firefox/Thunderbird. godaddy seems to be a Microsoft-only shop.
This is very disappointing. I use them for email and domain hosting. With email, you should be able to use whatever compliant application you want.. But apparently, this is not true.
Thumbs down for godaddy.com -- at least for email.
