I’ve noticed that the more we’re quarantined from our old lives, the more I’m irritated by stuff that I used to blow off. I’m sure it’s because like everyone, tensions are just generally higher so our fuses are shorter. It can’t possibly be that there are more stupid people out there (can it?).

Over the past couple of years, I’ve sold a number of things on eBay and I’ve begun to notice things that just don’t make sense.  I’ve noticed when I list an item with a “Buy It Now” price, I’ll often see it shows with a number of folks “watching” it.  I just can’t help but think to myself “huh?  What are you watching it FOR?” Watching an item makes sense if it’s something in an auction, you see what happens, how many people bid on it, how high the price goes and you drop out if it’s too high, or get in on the action at the last moment.  But with a “Buy It Now” item, the price is what the price is.  If you’re interested enough to watch it, good grief, buy it.  I mean I can understand if it had been listed for a while and you want to see if perhaps the price will drop but for items that are likely to sell fast, and are newly listed at an appropriate price, well you snooze, you lose.

On those same lines, I’ve also dipped my toe into the world of online garage sales through Facebook a few times, and while my neighbor seems to be really successful at selling her things, I am not.  I don’t think it’s pricing, but honestly, I’m not sure what it is.  All I know is that I am continually getting messages like these:

“Is this still available?”

I’ll reply it is, and then that’s it.  I’m ghosted.  Not even the courtesy of a “thanks, but no thanks” or “I’ve changed my mind”.  Just nothing.  So, I’m done with Facebook sales, folks are just too inconsiderate there. 

When I’m on a website and there’s a dropdown to select criteria for something, why am I forced to actually go and choose that criteria when it’s the only one?  My bank, Wings Financial, has a nice mobile app and offers online deposits, which I love.  But when you go to the deposit option, it asks which account you want to deposit to, and when I select it, I find there is only one option.  WHY?  If you have only one, then for the love of God, make it the default, or better yet, don’t make me choose it at all but bypass it and go to the next step.  Worse yet?  When I go to a website that I’ve been to before and see that it says “Hello, Beth” but forces me to log in before I can put in an order.  It clearly knows it’s me, it greeted me!  Why do I need to log in again?  Argh.

I was on a work call the other day as they were talking about how we want to work harder on more digital.  We are all asked to think about ways we can do that in our areas, and the comment was made that our organization has tried several different apps for member engagement and they really haven’t worked.  I’m pretty sure I know why.  When companies come up with an idea for a new end user app, it goes like this:

“Hey, how about we give our members an app to let them do ABC?”

“Sure, that’s awesome!  Go for it”

And a team from the company comes together.  They follow a playbook of how to do this: What is the concept, who will use it, what do we want them to get out of it, how will they get the info, how will they access it, how will it look, etc.  Then a mock up is done, an app is built and tested and if it works, it’s rolled out.  What’s missing from this picture?  Well, a) did anyone even think to ASK end users if they like they idea and b) assuming they do, did anyone ASK THEM how they want it to look, feel and work?  All I could think about when I heard the leader on the call say our previous efforts didn’t work was that it’s probably because we fail to ask the people who use the app what they want and how they want it to work, like the previously mentioned bank app.  Maybe if more companies did that, they’d have happier customers.  The same holds true for business web pages.  It looks to me like many of them have a web designer who follows some instructions on what to do, but fails to either test it or fails to ask some end users to trial it and provide feedback.  As a result, the pages are something less than useful.  A good example is with Bed, Bath and Beyond.  I was looking for something there, and clicked to sort by price lowest to highest.  I then went and added filters, clicked apply and noticed it defaulted back to sort by Most Popular.  So, I selected sort by “Lowest to Highest Price” again and it removed my filters!  What the heck.  I tweeted the company and to their credit they did reply, but it remains to be seen if they actually fix it. 

And finally, something that will make you tilt your head and say “huh?” We found this the other day on a package of new mens underwear:

Honestly, when was the last time YOU ironed YOUR underwear?

What kinds of kooky nonsense do you see in your world?