I type wicked fast. My fingers sometimes bang away at the keys at a rate faster than I can think.  But for all my mad typing skizzles, I’m a horrible speller.  And for all my speed, I’m hampered by habitual use of the delete/backspace key.  I’ve used it probably seven times in this sentence alone. And there are some errors I miss because I’m typing so fast I’ve already long since moved on.

Today when I went to register for a new Alltop account I misspelled my own email address.  (I know!  I’ve had it like 5 years now. You’d think my fingers would be on auto-pilot.)  Here’s what I entered instead:

Unfortunately, I didn’t notice my error and waited for almost an hour for my confirmation to show up. Of course, it never did and, impatient to get started, I went back to Alltop in search of answers. I clicked around on the website until I found a page that would send me a new confirmation email.

Good news: Alltop will send me an new email.  And they take out all of the guess work about what I’m supposed to do next on this page. I’m supposed to click “Yes, please.”  Indeed, I did send myself a second email before I realized the underlying issue.

Bad news: It’ll do me as much good as the first email.  Alltop doesn’t allow me to recover gracefully from my email address entry mistake.  There’s no option to say anything other than “Yes, please.”  (At least they’re polite.)

To their credit, Alltop does give me contact information on the preceding page.

Of course, I’d forgotten all about that by the time I got to this page.

So, what would make this user experience better?

1. The easiest – something that can be done today in less than 5 minutes – is just to move that contact us link over to the page.

(Note, I reformatted it as a text link rather than the url link.  The url is inconsistent with the style for the rest of the links on website.)

Estimated level of effort: VERY LOW

2. Add the ability to change my email address, starting with something like this:

Of course, this will require presenting back the original information to be edited by the user.  I don’t see any reason why the original registration modal window can’t be presented to the user and resubmitted.

Estimated level of effort: LOW/MEDIUM

3. Suppose changing my email address isn’t technically possible. That’s cool – sometimes there are technical limitations that can’t be easily solved.  I get that.  Just tell me about it and don’t keep me hanging.  Something like this:

Of course, there are a few limitations to this solution.  First of all, it’s a hack.  A really bad, somewhat shameful one.  Secondly, I lose my username. What if it’s the only username I ever use and I’m lost without it?  Finally, Alltop ends up with a bunch of abandoned accounts on its servers.

This is the worst of all the solutions. Still, it’s better than leaving me hanging.

Estimated level of effort: VERY LOW

4. Avoid this kind of error to begin with by running basic email validation during the registration process.

Really, this is a no-brainer. Think offensively rather than defensively, avoiding problems before they really even begin. Validate email addresses on the front end programmatically or by asking the user to enter the email address twice.  The former only ensures that email addresses are technically correct, but would have caught my error.  The latter is a more diligent approach, but the burden falls on the users who mostly hate entering their email address twice.  And, of course, the solutions can be used in tandem to hopefully eliminate all problems.

Estimated level of effort: MEDIUM

Conclusion

Everyone makes mistakes, and Alltop’s not the only website out there who’s fumbled a bit in the area of error messaging.  This doesn’t mean the Alltop website isn’t a good – some features, like the introduction video, are great.

This is just a standard user experience weakness.  (For me, a pretty big one.)

Building in the ability to fail gracefully and recover quickly creates a compassionate user experience and keeps customers engaged. As we’ve seen here, there are multiple ways to handle this sort of error recovery, some better than others.  We can even build successive levels of handling by pairing things like proactive form validation with reactive recovery measures.