How to lose customers with Flash and Flex

dug dug Follow Oct 25, 2009 · 1 min read
How to lose customers with Flash and Flex
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So here’s a use case I thought had gone away years ago… Nicki is driving, Dug’s riding shotgun and the kids are in the back. We’re all trying to squeeze in a quick flooring purchase to finish CU-2’s room today because we need it for his cousin who is coming to stay.

A not-up-to-date website means we’re sitting in the car park at the mall having just come out of the flooring shop that didn’t have the stuff we needed.

We’ve only got a couple more hours to get this sorted so tempers are getting frayed. “Wait, I know, Ikea sells similar stuff, let’s head out there. I’ll check their website on my phone” says Dug. Launch Safari, google search for IKEA flooring…

OK, so I know it’s not adobe’s fault the iPhone doesn’t support flash, and I know IKEA’s whole site isn’t in flash but none of that matters to the customer. When you’re designing a product you have to put the customer’s context of use before any other consideration.

I’m the customer, I want to give money to IKEA and the website says “no, fuck off we don’t want your business” from the customer’s point of view this is just a massive #fail on everybody’s part.

And of course in the end we did buy the flooring. Just not at IKEA.

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dug
Written by dug Follow
Hiya, life goes like this. Step 1: Get out of bed. Step 2: Make things better:-)