I don’t like Flash because it is responsible for the overwhelming majority of my browser crashes. I don’t like it because it consumes memory and (especially) CPU resources on my computer for almost the sole purpose of showing me advertisements, which also translates directly to reduced battery life on my laptop.
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But it’s interesting to note that it’s quite a technical and ethical challenge to run a browser without Flash.
Submit is always the wrong title for a button. Yet it’s still commonly used, even by people who should know better. I had “Submit Comment” buttons on my blog when I first published this.
Buttons should say what happens when they are pushed, in the vocabulary of the person pressing them. Technically a button might submit a form to a server, but what matters is the consequence of submitting the form.
For example,
this button should be called “Search” or “Find” or “See Matches” — something that describes what happens when it is pressed, or what the operator will see after pressing it.
That’s a Bad Word
“Submit” has negative connotations, and should be avoided. The first three example usages (in Mac OS X’s Dictionary.app) are all negative,
submit
verb
1 [ intrans. ] accept or yield to a superior force or to the authority or will of another person : the original settlers were forced to submit to Bulgarian rule.
• ( submit oneself) consent to undergo a certain treatment : he submitted himself to a body search.
• [ trans. ] subject to a particular process, treatment, or condition : samples submitted to low pressure.
Say an apartment takes applications on their website. It would be pedantically correct to say “Submit Application”. But it is more respectful to say “Send Application”, or “Apply”. Pressing a “Submit” button implicitly says “I submit”. And that’s the wrong relationship for a user to have to an interface.
Blame The Programmers (Not Really)
One reason so many buttons are labeled “Submit” is that the HTML code for making a button has the word “submit” in it. The code for is <input type="submit" value="This Button">.
If the keyword send was used to build buttons, I would argue that the web would be a slightly less intimidating place today. A button that demands you “send” something is better then a button that forces you to “submit”.
Choose Your Words Carefully…
So perhaps, when choosing programming terms, we should pick the ones with the fewest negative connotations, since inevitably some of those words will bleed over into user-land. Even if programmer words stay in programmer-land, word-choice influences the way we think about things. Best not to encourage berating your users and customers.
Of course, you shouldn’t go overboard avoiding “ungood” words! There is no question that the most clear term should be used (even if it’s offensive). A better programming-vocabulary means better, less buggy, programs. And that’s better for users (no matter what they are called behind their back). But if possible, avoid disparaging words.
And never submit to the temptation of calling a button “Submit”. There’s always a more accurate, respectful name.
We were wrong about the first-time shoppers. They did mind registering. They resented having to register when they encountered the page. As one shopper told us, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”
…Without even knowing what was involved in registration, all the users that clicked on the button did so with a sense of despair. Many vocalized how the retailer only wanted their information to pester them with marketing messages they didn’t want. Some imagined other nefarious purposes of the obvious attempt to invade privacy. (In reality, the site asked nothing during registration that it didn’t need to complete the purchase: name, shipping address, billing address, and payment information.)
Repeat customers weren’t any happier. Except for a very few who remembered their login information, most stumbled on the form. They couldn’t remember the email address or password they used. Remembering which email address they registered with was problematic – many had multiple email addresses or had changed them over the years.
When a shopper couldn’t remember the email address and password, they’d attempt at guessing what it could be multiple times. These guesses rarely succeeded. Some would eventually ask the site to send the password to their email address, which is a problem if you can’t remember which email address you initially registered with.
(Later, we did an analysis of the retailer’s database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.)
The form, intended to make shopping easier … just prevented sales – a lot of sales.
The $300,000,000 Fix
The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”
The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.
Personally, I am in complete sympathy with the test’s participants. I don’t want to have to register to do something. In fact, I’ve re-registered for ADC a few times, because I lost my login information. (I really wish I could reclaim my first ADC membership from highschool, now tied to a defunct AOL address, because the member # is one digit shorter!)
Security Implications
Unfortunately, people have good reason to be wary of registration — it puts their credit card information at risk. And we’ve all been burned by spam and junk-mail from someone who abused registration information.
The Future is Here
Modern web browsers all have some kind of auto-fill that can remember and enter shipping/billing information. This technology obsoletes the benefits of registration in the story.
There’s more that could be done to be smarter about registration. For example, not exposing it in any way unless a person has made several orders.
Of course, the smartest thing is to avoid registration, because your users hate it. Services like BugMeNot prove this.
The first semester of my sophomore year, I took CS 337: Theory in Programming Practice from Jaydev Misra. On the last day of class, he talked about computer science in general, took questions, and let us out early. And on thing he said really made an impression on me. I’m quoting from what I remember today, I didn’t write the exact quote down, so this could very well be embellished or incorrect in some detail,
Even if we had the fast computers we have today in the 1960’s, and even if we had the internet, we could not have built a modern web-browser, because we did not understand enough about building programs of that complexity.
It’s amazing how young software development is as a discipline.
Rands’ First Law of Information Management: “For each new piece of information you track, there is an equally old and useless piece of information you must throw away.”
