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Web usability and business success

An update slightly related to my previous post today. Yesterday I was organising something through a site in the US, which uses a rich Flash app somewhere in the process. Didn’t want to work with Mac’s Safari, so I tried Firefox 2. Someone else recommended trying Firefox 3 (beta 4) so I did, and that worked somewhat but not sufficiently for me to complete.

So, I went to another company instead where the equivalent app did work, ordered there, and all done. The first company actually lost my business because of this. I told them of the original problem, got a nice email response this morning, after which I gave them the feedback of how I had to work around it in the end (it was US night time so noone to call – if I could’ve even been bothered… the competitor had similar pricing).

The other company did have one glitch in their payment process, even though the form allowed for overseas billing addresses, it still insisted on me selecting a US state anyway. So in that form I live in Kenmore QLD, CA 4069. Wrote ’em a note about that… minor issue but I hope they fix it.

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