6 samsung’s sick usability tips & Good example of BAD website usability

I hate writing bad things as I always try to appreciate the initiatives and the moves but Samsung’s website was too much. Here are some of the reasons:

I went to http://www.samsung.com/in/support/productRegist/productRegistration.do to register a new Samsung AC. I found this page really quick (and that is good, thanks to Google and to Samsung).

Usability tip 1: It should be easily found on Google

Since I am a webmaster and my religion asks me to use firefox than IE, I continued my registration with firefox, I filled up the form to realize that their is no submit button.

Usability tip 2: It should work on all major browsers

Then my angry mind went on to twitter and post this message about Samsung’s website and started doing registration on IE (Internet Explorer). I was relieved to see the submit button. Things went ok and I started filling it up, I liked the drop down of state and city but when it comes to district I was really pissed off as I did not know what district to fill it up. My address did not had a district, it just said Kolkata, so I checked Kolkata and it did not work, so I had to choose few more districts to get the district right. Based on the district it filled my pin code (which I knew so I could clarify).

Usability tip 3: Make the process as simple as possible.

I thought it is done. It took me back to the same page. WHAT THE HELL IS BP NUMBER?

• It never told me anything about.
• It never told what I can expect after registration.
• It just confused even further.

Usability tip 4: Don’t use a term that people can’t understand (or explain it).

Usability tip 6: Always inform the visitor on what can be expected after signup.

Usability tip 5: Think 100 times to make a no-thinking path for website visitors.

Hope Samsung will listen to these feedback and hire some good usability experts to improve their web user experience. Afterall web is a village and Indian web is going to be a village really soon, so all the shops will be just a click away. Then the only differentiators will be user experience.

Tags: samsung, samsung india, search engine, usability