I’m no usability expert.  In fact, I own a phone with a camera that only ever snaps photos by mistake, usually the inside of my pocket. But I don’t need to be an expert to know that sites which require you fill out a huge form to get a price quote are poorly designed.  You’ve all seen these sites: Visit any auto insurance webpage to see what I mean. I hate this.  I have filled out exactly zero of these forms in my life, and I don’t expect the number to rise appreciably.

I know, auto insurance probably needs personal information to generate a quote, but anyone else is making themselves a problem.   These forms make me think there is something to hide, or I am going to have a sales person hounding me, or that my volume of spam is going to reach newly annoying highs.  Ultimately this is a trust problem, and not a problem with the form I think, but that’s another matter.  I would be really interested to see some figures about how many people bail out at the form filling page.  I suspect it’s a lot.

I’ve been thinking about this because we get a lot of people asking for price quotes.  I always happily give them out, but also think “hey, this is on our website,” and since they got our email from the website they should have seen it.  But they don’t.  So something is wrong, or at least wrongish.  I think our quote tool is hard to find.  I now suffer from over familiarity with the site, so I no longer see it, but I can recall having trouble finding it the first time, and the number of people who still ask tells me it’s too hard to find.

You get there this way: Go to our site, choose FogBugz from the list of products, select pricelist on the right side under the Learn About FogBugz area, and then inside there select the “Get an exact price quote now!” link which, adding to our trouble, is not easy to spot.   It’s worth it for us to think about how we could place this to make it super obvious to anyone who visits the site. 

The more interesting question though is, if we make it less hassle for a customer to find out how much an order will cost, are they more likely to make a purchase, or is this just too insignificant to matter?  And, moreover, can enough “too insignificant to matter” things that get improved lead to a kind of critical mass that, when taken together, lead to a much better experience and thus to more sales?