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The 10 Biggest Web Annoyances
In its relatively short life, the World Wide Web has already made many of our most mundane, tedious tasks quicker and easier to perform. But there are still a surprising number of activities--from helping us buy concert tickets to protecting our privacy--that, for one reason or another, the Web still can't get right, stirring the ire of even the most patient users. We look at ten of the worst of them.
Beyond obvious, nagging problems such as e-mail spam, phishing lures, viruses, and spyware, a great many commonplace online frustrations--some dating all the way back to the earliest days of the Web--remain unfixed.
We asked visitors at our online forums to identify what they consider the most dysfunctional aspects of the Web; then we polled our readers to find out which of these problems they find most aggravating. For each difficulty, we identified an "aggravation factor"--the percentage of readers who were either "very annoyed" or "infuriated" by the issue. We start with the ones that irk our readers most, and work our way down.
1. Dubious Privacy Policies
Aggravation factor: 69 percent
Many business-focused Web sites--Particularly in the areas of health and financial services--collect sensitive private information from users. The vast majority of these sites have established privacy policies to lay out what information the site collects and to delineate customers' rights. But the legal jargon in these policies is often laid on so thick that customers can't understand it, leaving them unsure about whether their private data is truly safe from misuse.
Amazon.com's online privacy notice, for example, is a 2700-word document that links to a 2600-word conditions-of-use page jam-packed with arcane legalese. Good luck figuring out your rights if you don't have a J.D. after your name. Privacy policies at some Web sites grant the sites very broad discretion in handling private data, including the right to use the data to market other products and services to members, and the right to share data with unknown, unnamed third parties--leaving the person who supplied the data feeling exposed.
Consumer advocates have found this problem exceedingly difficult to correct because site owners (via their attorneys) go to extremes to avoid legal liability. Of course, you can refuse to patronize any site that you suspect might take liberties with your data. But short of hiring a lawyer to analyze the privacy policy, how do you determine that a site is untrustworthy before it's too late?
2. Difficult Online Forms
Aggravation factor: 65 percent
Filling out a simple form online--be it for something as important as a loan application or as mundane as a news site registration--can turn into an endless cycle of annoying browser refreshes. That's because online forms often mix required and optional fields without clearly distinguishing between the two. While filling out the form, you inevitably skip one of the required fields and then sometimes have to start all over again because the site wipes the page clean. To be fair, things have improved in recent times as companies figure out that user frustration can hurt business. Still, since the problem is so easy to fix, its continued existence is mind-boggling. Site designers should clearly mark all required fields in a different color (red would work just fine). And if a user makes an error anyway, there's no reason to wipe all the fields clean. To move things along smoothly, Web site developers should highlight any field that still needs to be filled in.
3. Overcommercialization of the Web
Aggravation factor: 62 percent
Interstitials; pop-ups; pop-unders; noisy Flash commercials; strobe-lit banner ads; video ads that load without user action... Just another day on the Web.
The idea of pushing advertising in exchange for free Web services has led to overcommercialization of the Web--a major turn-off for surfers. At MySpace, Yahoo, and even (we have to admit it) PCWorld.com such advertising has grown more aggressive, increasingly annoying, and impossible to avoid. On cluttered Web pages, ads jostle against each other and vie for screen real estate with the content that visitors actually came to see. The result? Slower connection speeds, slower page loads, and far less user control over their browser.
Advertisements affect Web content, too. When sites measure the value of content by how many eyeballs it attracts to the ads, unusual, diverse, or niche content can get squeezed out in favor of more-reliably popular middle-of-the-road stuff. "I think in many ways, we have missed the potential of the Web--much like we did with television," says Mike Tinsley, a disappointed Web user in Columbus, Indiana. "When [the Web] was new, it held so much promise to be so useful for education, information, and even entertainment. However, much like TV, the Web has sunk to the lowest common denominator, and I'm not sure we can ever get it back," Tinsley says.
The ad-driven online content industry will continue to devise innovative, eye-catching, and obnoxious advertising formats, so things won't change for the better anytime soon. At the same time, browser makers and other software utility vendors may be able to offer some respite with features designed to restrain advertising annoyances. Browser producers like Microsoft and Mozilla should, by default, block animations or video ads from taking complete control of a Web page and obscuring the content A surfer is trying to view. At the very least, they should provide users an easy way to adjust the settings manually so as to block such intrusive annoyances.
Few things are more infuriating than going to a Web site and being told, "The page you have requested requires Internet Explorer to function properly."
(The photo at left spells out currently available browser support for Google Docs. Safari is not included)
The historical origin of this problem is Internet Explorer's incomplete (and sometimes incorrect) support for the core standards that are used to build Web pages. Because IE commands the largest market share among browsers, many Web designers build pages not to conform to standards, but to conform to IE. With Firefox's success, more and more sites (with the notable exception of some Microsoft sites) work properly in Mozilla's browser. But that leaves users of Opera or Safari out in the cold still. From online banking applications to newer Web 2.0-style sites, pages may not load properly on all browsers, which forces people to use different browsers for different sites.
If browsers were built to meet a consistent set of standards, this hiccup would disappear. Though each new version of IE has improved its support for standards, the problem persists because so many Web site developers continue to code only for IE, or IE and Firefox.
Having trouble creating a new document in Google Docs? The site's advice is so simplistic that it is unlikely to solve any real problems.
Among the high-profile offenders in this area are Google Docs, Washington Mutual, and Yahoo--none of which supports the Opera and Safari browsers.
5. Trolls in Forums
Aggravation factor: 58 percent
The Internet can be a spacious platform for all sorts of community interaction, provided that the participants conduct themselves in a civil manner. Too often, though, they don't.
"I hate when I am on a forum and people just post random comments about how much somebody is a jerk or how their religion saves," said PC World reader Roberta Dikeman of Dublin, California. "Can we please stay on topic--or post that drivel on your own sites!"
Hiding behind the pseudonymity of a Web alias, trolls disrupt useful discussions with ludicrous rants, inane threadjackings, personal insults, and abusive language, deliberately baiting forum regulars into pointless controversy and disharmony.
Trolls lurk everywhere--in Google and Yahoo newsgroups, in blog comment areas, and on specialty message boards created to offer technical help to users.
The free and fruitful exchange of ideas on the Web suffers when Web community owners have to moderate discussions and keep a tight rein on membership. But such actions are among the few effective ways to maintain civiliA-ty and sanity in online forums. Another approach is for users to police the community themselves by collectively ignoring or dismissing malicious interlopers.
6. Buying Event Tickets
Aggravation factor: 54 percent
Sites like Ticketmaster have managed to transform one of the Internet's biggest conveniences--the ability to buy and print out event tickets in a few mouse clicks--into one of its biggest rip-offs. Never mind that automated ticketing companies have dispensed with much of the traditional overhead (staff, rent, equipment) associated with selling tickets at a physical location. Never mind that they don't have to print the tickets you buy or ship them to your home.
Ticketmaster.com, the world's largest ticketing agent, adds a $9 "convenience charge" to the price of every $32.50 ticket for a concert in San Francisco, for example, plus a $4.90 "processing fee" on top of every order. So if you buy one ticket, you pay 42 percent of the face value of the ticket in fees to Ticketmaster! In contrast, assuming that the show isn't sold out, you can buy the same ticket at the Civic Auditorium box office sans convenience fees for $32.50--a savings of nearly $14.
One reason that Ticketmaster can impose such prices is that it faces little competition in the events ticketing business; the company holds exclusive contracts with the majority of venues in the United States. In 1994, the rock band Pearl Jam famously complained to the U.S. Department of Justice that TicketMaster's high prices were made possible by a monopoly, but the DOJ ultimately decided that Ticketmaster hadn't broken any antitrust laws.
Beyond obvious, nagging problems such as e-mail spam, phishing lures, viruses, and spyware, a great many commonplace online frustrations--some dating all the way back to the earliest days of the Web--remain unfixed.
We asked visitors at our online forums to identify what they consider the most dysfunctional aspects of the Web; then we polled our readers to find out which of these problems they find most aggravating. For each difficulty, we identified an "aggravation factor"--the percentage of readers who were either "very annoyed" or "infuriated" by the issue. We start with the ones that irk our readers most, and work our way down.
1. Dubious Privacy Policies
Aggravation factor: 69 percent
Many business-focused Web sites--Particularly in the areas of health and financial services--collect sensitive private information from users. The vast majority of these sites have established privacy policies to lay out what information the site collects and to delineate customers' rights. But the legal jargon in these policies is often laid on so thick that customers can't understand it, leaving them unsure about whether their private data is truly safe from misuse.
Amazon.com's online privacy notice, for example, is a 2700-word document that links to a 2600-word conditions-of-use page jam-packed with arcane legalese. Good luck figuring out your rights if you don't have a J.D. after your name. Privacy policies at some Web sites grant the sites very broad discretion in handling private data, including the right to use the data to market other products and services to members, and the right to share data with unknown, unnamed third parties--leaving the person who supplied the data feeling exposed.
Consumer advocates have found this problem exceedingly difficult to correct because site owners (via their attorneys) go to extremes to avoid legal liability. Of course, you can refuse to patronize any site that you suspect might take liberties with your data. But short of hiring a lawyer to analyze the privacy policy, how do you determine that a site is untrustworthy before it's too late?
2. Difficult Online Forms
Aggravation factor: 65 percent
Filling out a simple form online--be it for something as important as a loan application or as mundane as a news site registration--can turn into an endless cycle of annoying browser refreshes. That's because online forms often mix required and optional fields without clearly distinguishing between the two. While filling out the form, you inevitably skip one of the required fields and then sometimes have to start all over again because the site wipes the page clean. To be fair, things have improved in recent times as companies figure out that user frustration can hurt business. Still, since the problem is so easy to fix, its continued existence is mind-boggling. Site designers should clearly mark all required fields in a different color (red would work just fine). And if a user makes an error anyway, there's no reason to wipe all the fields clean. To move things along smoothly, Web site developers should highlight any field that still needs to be filled in.
3. Overcommercialization of the Web
Aggravation factor: 62 percent
Interstitials; pop-ups; pop-unders; noisy Flash commercials; strobe-lit banner ads; video ads that load without user action... Just another day on the Web.
The idea of pushing advertising in exchange for free Web services has led to overcommercialization of the Web--a major turn-off for surfers. At MySpace, Yahoo, and even (we have to admit it) PCWorld.com such advertising has grown more aggressive, increasingly annoying, and impossible to avoid. On cluttered Web pages, ads jostle against each other and vie for screen real estate with the content that visitors actually came to see. The result? Slower connection speeds, slower page loads, and far less user control over their browser.
Advertisements affect Web content, too. When sites measure the value of content by how many eyeballs it attracts to the ads, unusual, diverse, or niche content can get squeezed out in favor of more-reliably popular middle-of-the-road stuff. "I think in many ways, we have missed the potential of the Web--much like we did with television," says Mike Tinsley, a disappointed Web user in Columbus, Indiana. "When [the Web] was new, it held so much promise to be so useful for education, information, and even entertainment. However, much like TV, the Web has sunk to the lowest common denominator, and I'm not sure we can ever get it back," Tinsley says.
The ad-driven online content industry will continue to devise innovative, eye-catching, and obnoxious advertising formats, so things won't change for the better anytime soon. At the same time, browser makers and other software utility vendors may be able to offer some respite with features designed to restrain advertising annoyances. Browser producers like Microsoft and Mozilla should, by default, block animations or video ads from taking complete control of a Web page and obscuring the content A surfer is trying to view. At the very least, they should provide users an easy way to adjust the settings manually so as to block such intrusive annoyances.
Few things are more infuriating than going to a Web site and being told, "The page you have requested requires Internet Explorer to function properly."
(The photo at left spells out currently available browser support for Google Docs. Safari is not included)
The historical origin of this problem is Internet Explorer's incomplete (and sometimes incorrect) support for the core standards that are used to build Web pages. Because IE commands the largest market share among browsers, many Web designers build pages not to conform to standards, but to conform to IE. With Firefox's success, more and more sites (with the notable exception of some Microsoft sites) work properly in Mozilla's browser. But that leaves users of Opera or Safari out in the cold still. From online banking applications to newer Web 2.0-style sites, pages may not load properly on all browsers, which forces people to use different browsers for different sites.
If browsers were built to meet a consistent set of standards, this hiccup would disappear. Though each new version of IE has improved its support for standards, the problem persists because so many Web site developers continue to code only for IE, or IE and Firefox.
Having trouble creating a new document in Google Docs? The site's advice is so simplistic that it is unlikely to solve any real problems.
Among the high-profile offenders in this area are Google Docs, Washington Mutual, and Yahoo--none of which supports the Opera and Safari browsers.
5. Trolls in Forums
Aggravation factor: 58 percent
The Internet can be a spacious platform for all sorts of community interaction, provided that the participants conduct themselves in a civil manner. Too often, though, they don't.
"I hate when I am on a forum and people just post random comments about how much somebody is a jerk or how their religion saves," said PC World reader Roberta Dikeman of Dublin, California. "Can we please stay on topic--or post that drivel on your own sites!"
Hiding behind the pseudonymity of a Web alias, trolls disrupt useful discussions with ludicrous rants, inane threadjackings, personal insults, and abusive language, deliberately baiting forum regulars into pointless controversy and disharmony.
Trolls lurk everywhere--in Google and Yahoo newsgroups, in blog comment areas, and on specialty message boards created to offer technical help to users.
The free and fruitful exchange of ideas on the Web suffers when Web community owners have to moderate discussions and keep a tight rein on membership. But such actions are among the few effective ways to maintain civiliA-ty and sanity in online forums. Another approach is for users to police the community themselves by collectively ignoring or dismissing malicious interlopers.
6. Buying Event Tickets
Aggravation factor: 54 percent
Sites like Ticketmaster have managed to transform one of the Internet's biggest conveniences--the ability to buy and print out event tickets in a few mouse clicks--into one of its biggest rip-offs. Never mind that automated ticketing companies have dispensed with much of the traditional overhead (staff, rent, equipment) associated with selling tickets at a physical location. Never mind that they don't have to print the tickets you buy or ship them to your home.
Ticketmaster.com, the world's largest ticketing agent, adds a $9 "convenience charge" to the price of every $32.50 ticket for a concert in San Francisco, for example, plus a $4.90 "processing fee" on top of every order. So if you buy one ticket, you pay 42 percent of the face value of the ticket in fees to Ticketmaster! In contrast, assuming that the show isn't sold out, you can buy the same ticket at the Civic Auditorium box office sans convenience fees for $32.50--a savings of nearly $14.
One reason that Ticketmaster can impose such prices is that it faces little competition in the events ticketing business; the company holds exclusive contracts with the majority of venues in the United States. In 1994, the rock band Pearl Jam famously complained to the U.S. Department of Justice that TicketMaster's high prices were made possible by a monopoly, but the DOJ ultimately decided that Ticketmaster hadn't broken any antitrust laws.
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