Interesting post over at Chuck McKay’s blog, featuring his click-by-click frustrations in trying to purchase and download live recordings from Gov’t Mule. (Serendipity side note: I happen to have had The Deepest End playing in the car for the last couple of days…thanks again to Shel for the excellent rec!)
In trying to recreate the challenges that McKay had, it seems that this is a case where trying to provide too much information got in the way of the customer experience. If one charges through the site, and drills down to the “purchase” areas, and tunes out the extraneous information, it’s fairly easy to purchase the MP3 files from the site. On the other hand, if one dives into the FAQ, it’s easy to get distracted from the main objective. (“What the heck is FLAC?” I don’t care! Just gimme the music!”)
The key takeaway? Don’t make it hard for the customer to do business with you.