Sigh. I have seen screens like this way too often, but right now I am tired, sick and cranky and figured Carsguide need a bit of public shaming.
Hey Carsguide - as much as I’d love to enter the location and hit the search button, you decided that it would be a better idea to have a ridiculously big banner ad OVER THE INPUT FIELDS so the entire search module is entirely and completely useless. Really smart move guys, especially when there are 8 other ads on the page already.
I can see the geniuses at Carsguide sitting there wondering why people don’t want to do any searches but congratulating themselves as the banner ad is getting loads of click-throughs. I can also see them keeping the ad there as the click-throughs are so high.
There is a little close button on the ad that doesn’t actually close the ad, it just makes it about 5 pixels smaller.
Oh well. No car research for me today, and especially not from Carsguide.
UPDATE: Jaz from Carsguide has sent me a screenshot of how the page should look in Firefox. Comments below.
This post is tagged under: Usability
hey from the image it looks like it was an ad that looked like a mouse over expandable ad (hence the close button on the ad). so maybe you just needed to mouse away from the ad?
and also from the image it looks like you are using a mac. safari? firefox?
these javascripty type rollover ads can be buggy in ‘edge case’ configs like OSX and safari. we can assume that a site like carsguide doesnt get a lot of traffic from that config. and they obviously did not test the creative in that set up. should we be blaming instead the creative house that toyota used to build the ad? probably some small web-dev shop or freelancer? :-)
hey - i am not saying its right…just that i dont think carsguide would have seen a lot of impact as most users would probably not have been impacted like you were.
isnt this one of the joys of having a mac? experiencing the web like most others dont?
say hi to scott for me.
Hey M,
Yeah it looks like you can close the ad, but when you click the close button, it only subtracted about 20 pixels from the top so it was still useless.
Yes I’m firefox on a Mac but we’re growing in number.
I’m not going to buy a PC so it just means that Carsguide has lost a customer, and I am in the market for a car so I’m a potentially lucrative customer.
Just means I’m going to their competitors as they can’t be bothered hiring a developer to cross-browser test.
hey like i said its not right. i am the first person to say that competition is only 1 click away. and users are quite fickle.
also, if the website is really useful to me, i dont think I would let this little glitch get in the way.
do you get a lot of website issues using firefox on osx?
Ah see I’m the opposite - if a website is useful but pisses me off by not letting me complete a task, I’ll go elsewhere.
That’s another reason I get annoyed by this, I almost never have issues on FF on Mac. I used to get more issues on IE on a PC than I do with my current setup.
I know I work on sites that are more aimed at the “geek” end of the market but Firefox stats are huge - around 60% of the browser market on most of my sites. Macs are growing up there with PCs too, at about 60% windows vs 35% mac.
just wondering - if they valued your feedback (and really thought that users valued the ads on their site) should they have 2 links under each ad:
- one link saying ‘report bad ad’
- one link saying ’see all ads’
would you have been bothered to report the bad ad?
and just remember - we are not normal. normal people would come back. or refresh the page. wouldn’t they?
HI Cheryl
I’m the business analyst for carsguide, thanks for posting about this issue that has affected your use of our site. Let me apologise that this has caused you to remove us from consideration in your car search, I hope you reconsider as our browseable search and site has some of the highest user engagement metrics in our industry as well as adhering to high standards of code compliance.
I have investigated your screenshot just now and if you’ll permit me to reply.
We are not able to replicate your screen presentation. In fact we note that the CSS is not active on the screenshot taken. This can be seen in the default browser font and broken layout of some of the search elements.
On a Macbook Pro we have here I’ve just tested, in Safari and Firefox, we cannot achieve that ad floating so far up that it covers the input fields. If you can describe how you were able to do this, I’ll be happy to take a further look. In the meantime I have forwarded screenshots we have just taken on the Macbook to you.
If you are happy to acknowledge our response, we’d appreciate if you can post them up for a side by side comparison of what the site actually looks like.
On the issue of expanding ads, I am sure someone of your experience is well aware of the ongoing tussle between commercial imperatives and pure site usability. For our part we take user experience very seriously, and it informs many of our efforts before a line of code is written.
If there is anything further I can do, please let me know.
Regards,
Jaz
Hey Jaz,
Thanks for following up, it’s nice you guys actually keep an eye on blogs and your customers.
Ok I must have had a temporary glitch in the matrix on the day I was looking - I did reload the page but had the same error but accept that I was probably an exception.
I do have to say though, the expanding ad still covers the search button. I can close it and find the button but as a consumer it sends me a message that your advertisers are more important than your users - you’re making me work to complete my task of a simple search by blocking my way with an ad. It’s as if a newspaper put sticky ads all over an article that you have to look under to read. I’d stop reading that paper…
I do understand the position you’re in, the advertisers pay the bills, etc. Hell, I’ve even commissioned a few OTP ads in my time (I didn’t feel good about it) because yes, they work. I just don’t think covering the search box with an ad is a good idea, especially when there is so much space for ads everywhere else, and you have such a captive audience.
Just my 2c.
I appreciate your response!
[...] http://www.moltn.com/blog/2008/09/28/when-marketing-take-over-interaction-design/ [...]
The perspective of a non-geeky end-user…
Intrusive ads make me so mad, I once looked up the contact details of Honda head office so I could write them an email to complain about their animated, moving popup ad on an SMH page.
And don’t get me started on video ads which start automatically and contain sound effects - hey guys, some of us are pretending to work!
Just getting someone’s attention doesn’t mean you have their respect or custom. Needless to say, I haven’t bought a Honda recently……