alt Hacker NewsI'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
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As the article points out, it depends on what you want. Do you want customers to reach out? For some, the answer really is "yes," for whatever reason that may be.
The author isn't generically ranting against contact pages that redirect you to support documentation — they're pointing out that this customer wasn't considering the customer behaviour they wanted and instead followed a trend. In this case, it was counter to what they wanted the customer to do.
> I'm perfectly happy with "speaking to a human" being the last port of call to fix a problem.
Both versions of the Contact page have issues. The author's version (with only a form) doesn't let you specify whether you want to contact sales, support, or other. Once submitted, you have no way of knowing whether it succeeded, or who it got sent to (as opposed to sending an email, which will at least bounce if it's a bad address).
As for the client's version of the page, the only way of contacting a human is to get in touch with the sales team, which in my experience is all but useless if you need support. (Also "Reach out to..." is corporate doublespeak, and it's not immediately obvious what will happen when you click that button: mailto? tel? Input form? Other?) There's nothing more annoying than hunting for, say, a company's address, clicking the "Contact" link, and having it mailto instead of giving you the info you need.
It really depends on how hard they make it to actually make a support request.
> I'm not sure I've ever seen a contact page that wasn't like this.
Click the “Contact” link at the bottom of this HN page. It’s a mailto link.
mailto:[email protected]
Reeder has a simple contact form on the page.
https://reederapp.com/classic/
Overcast list an email and social media to contact.
Alfred points to the forum and lists email addresses to contact.
https://www.alfredapp.com/help/contact/
iA Writer lists emails.
SnippetsLab list an email.
https://www.renfei.org/snippets-lab/manual/mac/share-your-fe...
iTerm2 list an email.
Those are just a few off the top of my head. Indie developers tend to be more respectful of their customers.
> 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
Yet, too often, it simply isn’t.
Sometimes you do need to speak to a human, especially if you don't have much money and they've taken a lot of it from you.
Hostile customer service is a sign that a company is too comfortable and there is insufficient competition in the marketplace.
Except the "fuck off contact page" doesn't have a way to speak to a human who can solve a problem, it only has a way to talk to sales which is clearly the wrong department.
Very often it’s available somewhere but difficult enough to find that sometimes I give up trying, which I assume is what they’re going for.
One of our products had a proper contact page (just a select box box to decide on something, then one outcome was a contact form) and now it's a fuck off contact page.
Sometimes (like here) there are even some good reasons (e.g. we host this product and the first point of contact is in fact another business entity, so they get to decide) and apparently their MO is "you will use this ticket system no matter what you want, so only if you are a certain customer with a login it will work" whereas before you could at least write a "hello, here's a technical problem" that would reach us and not them. Ah well.