alt Hacker NewsThe fuck off contact page
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Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.
"You will get less leads with the 'enterprise style' contact page. You don't have enough leads right now. You don't have low value self-serve users you want to turn away. Your BDR team is not overflowing with leads you need to turn away. You can make money from having more leads. Less leads will generate less revenue. Here are some potential metrics from the two styles of contact pages. Here is how these metrics tie into revenue."
I think an honest message like this, at least communicated via email to the budget owners would abscond... or at least absolve one of any guilt.
Also, thank you for having the option to toggle the font. I wrote a css rule, but found it later.
Urgh... One of the worst things, when you want to contact someone and they have hidden every means of doing so. It reflects badly on the companies that do this and questions why such pages exist to begin with. I understand why companies hate spam, but when a company hides customer service, that should be a major red flag and reeks of cowardice. Customers can and do have major problems, not just Karen type issues, but being ripped off for hundreds or even thousands. They sometimes hide behind underpaid staff who are students or can barely speak English.
As someone that works on this space, with the kind of products that want this kind of contact pages, they forgot to mention that even behind login walls, in some products you only get to create a support ticket if there are enough developers with the right level of certifications and partnership.
This website is a great example of when I’d want to use reader mode in my browser and it also breaks that
As always, I was writing a comment to another comment and thought that it might be relevant to create a new (top?) comment itself too (sorry if its "plagiarism")
But basically one other type of such contact pages are when a company has such a contact page + it only works for customers who have logged in and they can only login entirely if they give their credit/debit card info.
I found it to be the case for hetzner,contabo basically. OVH had a discord server which I could join to ask some basic inqueries/support, I never understand the companies which do not have any such things like discord,telegram etc.
In an ideal world I would want them to run matrix or open source but even if they are on discord, it can be light years ahead of the contact page they have right now which I simply don't understand.
I wish to be more anonymous with my credit/debit card info, I recently went into nerding about vps providers basically and signing up via crypto for all its hate was something I enjoyed. (Funny how I linked my previous crypto comments to this contact page idea)
I think ignorance can play a deal in it. I don't think all companies do it out of malice as the article points out, some do it by ignorance. So in a way, Kudos for raising awareness about it.
That with its pixel art is styled so beautifully and so hard to read at the same time. Couldn't read it at all. (It's not an eye vision problem, reading pixel fonts just is quite taxing on the brain).
This whole post is coming of a bit naive to me... I highly doubt this client is just an inspirational design meeting away from changing their offering and make a massive investment in customer support. I also don't get why a web-development consultant would feel so responsible for a pretty typical business decision.
Well good news, these days there's another layer. "Not even GPT4-level LLM" bots that frustrate you into giving up by circling to the FAQs over and over.
Great post! And I must admit that this must be the best website I've encountered in ages. The mix of oldschool OS with the pixelated font.. Perfect!
Communicating process is a top-notch hint. Getting everyone involved in meetings to the have the same context and expectations about the common goals is never easy.
I agree with the author in that there are such things as "fuck off" contact pages; I deal with them often looking for hardware and software and professional services. The gating of contact behind a sales department is one method of "fucking off" a person, but so is omitting necessary contact information, gating it behind some absolutely hostile AI chat agent, or just burying the page entirely. Certain large American ISPs are very guilty of this behavior, even going so far as to make the entire process of contacting them one giant, deliberately engineered "fuck off and die" experience across literally every medium of contact (web, mail, phone call, etc.).
Though to be fair, this is a bit rich coming from a blog that I'd describe as a "fuck off blog". This was incredibly difficult to read. I'm all for people doing whatever they want with their site (I'm guilty of doing ornery things on my site because I enjoy it and the aesthetic), but I find the irony palpable.
Regarding the communicative iterations where you desperately (read: hopelessly) try to convince a client otherwise as they demand something unreasonable; 100% on-point. In my consultations with a close friend I've found that it's not only hard, but interpersonally challenging to say "no" to someone when you're either being compensated by them or in some personal relationship with them that you don't want to jeopardize. The best advice I've recieved regarding business operations is "don't do business with friends", and I imagine this kind of situation is one of the biiggest reasons why. Someone being set on a terrible idea and relying on you to implement it is not pleasant. My experience with this to date has been informal, but I'd imagine that once legal contracts are involved it becomes hair loss-tier stressful to deal with.
Sometimes I take it as a challenge to find the real contact and talk to a real human in support. When I do that I feel like I completed the final level on Wolfenstein game.
The rise of AI has a lot to do with how these pages keep inventing new ways to avoid offering real support. And along with it comes their close cousin: the “go-away” chat agent—full of useless answers and designed specifically to prevent you from reaching an actual human.
Wow, that's website theme is awesome. windows XP like, breath of nostalgia. Thank you for that !
I often find myself in the bizarre situation of backing out of a suppliers website to google their contact number. A bit like when you want pricing on something without falling into a sales funnel.
My favorite is "have trouble logging in? click here" which redirects you to a contact page which is behind the login wall.
Can I change the topic to the current hiring process?
Decline mails feel like an even bigger fuck you. Sometimes you don't get a proper reason and it leaves you confused.
There's this one company I applied to, I already knew someone there (not close or anything) and from his tone it seemed like I could help them out a lot. They simply needed more manpower, and I already worked with that stack.
I got declined via mail within an hour. How am I supposed to interpret this as "hmm, they checked my resume, had a long thought and decided it wasn't worth it to invite me for a quick 1:1"? It just screams "we either automate everything or don't even bother looking at our options".
They also finished with a "please subscribe to our newsletter".
How am I supposed to take these applications seriously if they basically tell me to fuck off?
I really want to believe that many of the "fuck off contact pages" that we see are a result of just naive clients mimicking other flashy sites but I think that in most cases it is just a conscious decision to reduce/limit support costs.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world - I noticed in SEA businesses are more like "just contact us" with a phone number directly available / facebook page. Like, they don't want you to do anything with the website, they expect you to chat with them directly.
If you want to design a proper fuck off contact page, one valuable thing is: put as many mandatory fields as you can into the contact form!
Full name, contact e-mail, your corporate rank, company name, company phone number, what kind of product are you making, have you fucked off yet, no, then the address of your company's legal office, the name of your pet and how many millions is your company willing to spend with us. That's the bare minimum!
This reminds me of https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell. Endless iterations with cat pictures thrown into the mix.
The most impressive "fuck off contact page" I've seen was from Trade Republic, an investment app. The support page has a QR code to the in-app FAQ and nothing else.
Turns out that a handful of FAQ answers have a chat widget (with a chatbot, of course) that can be coaxed into switching out to a human. But if your topic is not on the FAQ, the answer doesn't have a chat widget, or you don't randomly click around other topics, you'll never find a contact form.
Even the "complaints" email address found in their legally-mandated Impressum just auto-replies with instructions to use the app help. I've since closed my account, but I'm still amazed how a company holding people's money can shield itself so completely from customers.
I hate generic name-text-submit-forms as the only method of contact. Somehow the article makes them the definition of not a "f** off contact page" - why?
I think such forms are a direct downgrade from providing an email address.
- Responding to the submissions likely requires email anyway
- Impersonation/spam is even less difficult
- Sender isn't guaranteed to get a record of sending the message
- A faceless form with unknown machinery feels like sending messages in a bottle
I'm not sure I've ever seen a contact page that wasn't like this. I always felt it was basically reasonable. if you can direct someone to an answer without having to waste money/time/compute on providing custom service, then that seems basically reasonable to me. yes it's annoying, but it's not a pattern I've ever felt was particularly dark. I'm perfectly happy with "speaking to a human" being the last port of call to fix a problem. as long as it is available somewhere
This is such a beautiful website. God, I love that design! Well done, OP! So beautiful :)
My countries groupon had a fuck off page. It had a phone number but it wasnt connected. It had a bot (need I say more). As a hail mary I sent them an email. They got back in 10 minutes and fixed the issue. Like wtf? that was a suprising bonus. But an awful experience to get there.
I love this site it’s so cute and interesting
The contact page on the left is something I absolutely hate. If the prefer method of contact is email, just give me an email. If they need to enter that into some ticketing system, give me access to the ticketing system. The page on right give me some ideas how they handle things internally.
The form on left is almost certainly a webform-to-email, this is ridiculous.
looking at font choice, how ironic they are complaining about UX
very nice website !
Udemy is famous for the fuck off style for paying customers.
There is also the “Fuck off support ticket”. I got this from FreshService - they changed the way they did loan requests in such a way that you could loan out one item twice with the status of delivered on both requests. So then you have two people who have been delivered the same item, which is clearly impossible.
Anyway, after arguing with them from for months, they acknowledge it as a bug. I wait for it to be fixed, months roll away. Then they tell me it has been lodged as an “enhancement request”.
Don’t deal with FreshService. Needless to say, we are soon to be leaving them.
Whenever I encounter one of these fuck off pages, I make a point to remove all possibility of ever purchasing anything from them.
(including you, Google).
Don't be so inconsiderate. Humans increase costs. The silicon valley oligarchs do not have enough. They need to reduce costs. Replace everyone possible with "AI". They are on the race to the first trillion after all.
Good luck trying to reach a human for support on google, one of the most rich companies in history, that permeates virtually every aspect of life.
A lot of comments recommend just putting an email on the contact page, which I agree is nice.
Related question: do good, privacy-preserving, cookie-less alternatives to reCAPTCHA exist?