"You will get less leads with the 'enterprise style' contact page. You don't have enough leads right now. You don't have low value self-serve users you want to turn away. Your BDR team is not overflowing with leads you need to turn away. You can make money from having more leads. Less leads will generate less revenue. Here are some potential metrics from the two styles of contact pages. Here is how these metrics tie into revenue."
I think an honest message like this, at least communicated via email to the budget owners would abscond... or at least absolve one of any guilt.
Also, thank you for having the option to toggle the font. I wrote a css rule, but found it later.
Actually, the default font is much more pleasant than that used on this site (https://lenowo.org/index.php) which I complained about a few days ago - and that site doesn't have an option to make it more readable as far as I can see...
It's "cool" but in terms of usability I think it's terrible. I would think that someone who works full time as a designer and has strong opinions on right and wrong would think twice about wasting screen real estate on mobile devices with a bunch of bullshit like a sticky menu, footer and comically huge "window"-headers.
The only thing I see is the design equivalent of over-engineering a car with bells and whistles that nobody gives a shit about, it's simply showing off and sending a signal to other designers, which is obviously fine if that's what you're going for, but personally I hate it (as you may suspect, my job is not in design).
Don't be so inconsiderate. Humans increase costs. The silicon valley oligarchs do not have enough. They need to reduce costs. Replace everyone possible with "AI". They are on the race to the first trillion after all.
Good luck trying to reach a human for support on google, one of the most rich companies in history, that permeates virtually every aspect of life.
That with its pixel art is styled so beautifully and so hard to read at the same time. Couldn't read it at all. (It's not an eye vision problem, reading pixel fonts just is quite taxing on the brain).
It's pixel-art styled but not pixel-art arted (is that even a word?). The font does not cleanly align on pixel boundaries on non-HiDPI screens thus it appears blurry. In fact, the whole website appears blurry.
Folks, when making pixel-art styled stuff, ensure they are actually sharp on bix-pixels screen. It's not pixel-art if it's sharp only on your macbook.
I agree with the author in that there are such things as "fuck off" contact pages; I deal with them often looking for hardware and software and professional services. The gating of contact behind a sales department is one method of "fucking off" a person, but so is omitting necessary contact information, gating it behind some absolutely hostile AI chat agent, or just burying the page entirely. Certain large American ISPs are very guilty of this behavior, even going so far as to make the entire process of contacting them one giant, deliberately engineered "fuck off and die" experience across literally every medium of contact (web, mail, phone call, etc.).
Though to be fair, this is a bit rich coming from a blog that I'd describe as a "fuck off blog". This was incredibly difficult to read. I'm all for people doing whatever they want with their site (I'm guilty of doing ornery things on my site because I enjoy it and the aesthetic), but I find the irony palpable.
Regarding the communicative iterations where you desperately (read: hopelessly) try to convince a client otherwise as they demand something unreasonable; 100% on-point. In my consultations with a close friend I've found that it's not only hard, but interpersonally challenging to say "no" to someone when you're either being compensated by them or in some personal relationship with them that you don't want to jeopardize. The best advice I've recieved regarding business operations is "don't do business with friends", and I imagine this kind of situation is one of the biiggest reasons why. Someone being set on a terrible idea and relying on you to implement it is not pleasant. My experience with this to date has been informal, but I'd imagine that once legal contracts are involved it becomes hair loss-tier stressful to deal with.
This whole post is coming of a bit naive to me... I highly doubt this client is just an inspirational design meeting away from changing their offering and make a massive investment in customer support. I also don't get why a web-development consultant would feel so responsible for a pretty typical business decision.
There is an underlying point in general, but it seems like the author has got hung up over the words "talk to our sales team" and wants to ditch the whole design and go to something with less function as a result.
If I was hiring them I might well start ignoring them at this point as well - thy are literally proposing only implementing only one of the three methods, and the most simple one at that.
I assume I've determined that customers want ready access to some questions. I assume that I have a physical location customers want to see.
Proposing to ditch these is preposterous. I could see proposing inlining the contract form. I could see using more neutral terms ('get in touch' vs 'contract our sales team').
They explained it. It goes against the client's goals. Massive investment in customer support? It's about generating leads. I think you're seen it as a SaaS offering which the writer has mentioned multiple times, isn't the case for the client.
The rise of AI has a lot to do with how these pages keep inventing new ways to avoid offering real support. And along with it comes their close cousin: the “go-away” chat agent—full of useless answers and designed specifically to prevent you from reaching an actual human.
As someone that works on this space, with the kind of products that want this kind of contact pages, they forgot to mention that even behind login walls, in some products you only get to create a support ticket if there are enough developers with the right level of certifications and partnership.
One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card
That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.
Hetzner team if you are reading this, although I love email platform, is there any way that your support stops being AI (which annoyed me) but rather you can have an discord,matrix (preferred),telegram, heck IRC or even slack for what its worth where I can message the team if I wanted a custom solution on top of hetzner etc.
Fwiw, Upcloud provided support and heard me out even if I didnt share my credit card info so massive respects to them and I am sure that my experience with hetzner has always been positive (they responded to me once on hackernews which was peak) but maybe if they are reading this (then hello!) and yea, please hetzner I hope you change your contact page to be more suitable or hear my complaints as I like hetzner a lot too
Personally, I am starting to value contact support which I thought didn't matter a lot nowadays. It doesn't matter if its cheap or not but rather if I can talk to their team once about any product and see if I can match their terms of service and similar basically or other issues in general too.
Also Hetzner, another point, I would love to be able to write articles for you and get the 50$ (I will read it again to see if I can "write" according to the conditions but yea) and similar but once again I need a hetzner account which required credit card/debit card validation.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a contact page that wasn't like this. I always felt it was basically reasonable. if you can direct someone to an answer without having to waste money/time/compute on providing custom service, then that seems basically reasonable to me. yes it's annoying, but it's not a pattern I've ever felt was particularly dark. I'm perfectly happy with "speaking to a human" being the last port of call to fix a problem. as long as it is available somewhere
Except the "fuck off contact page" doesn't have a way to speak to a human who can solve a problem, it only has a way to talk to sales which is clearly the wrong department.
As the article points out, it depends on what you want. Do you want customers to reach out? For some, the answer really is "yes," for whatever reason that may be.
The author isn't generically ranting against contact pages that redirect you to support documentation — they're pointing out that this customer wasn't considering the customer behaviour they wanted and instead followed a trend. In this case, it was counter to what they wanted the customer to do.
> I'm perfectly happy with "speaking to a human" being the last port of call to fix a problem.
Both versions of the Contact page have issues. The author's version (with only a form) doesn't let you specify whether you want to contact sales, support, or other. Once submitted, you have no way of knowing whether it succeeded, or who it got sent to (as opposed to sending an email, which will at least bounce if it's a bad address).
As for the client's version of the page, the only way of contacting a human is to get in touch with the sales team, which in my experience is all but useless if you need support. (Also "Reach out to..." is corporate doublespeak, and it's not immediately obvious what will happen when you click that button: mailto? tel? Input form? Other?) There's nothing more annoying than hunting for, say, a company's address, clicking the "Contact" link, and having it mailto instead of giving you the info you need.
One of our products had a proper contact page (just a select box box to decide on something, then one outcome was a contact form) and now it's a fuck off contact page.
Sometimes (like here) there are even some good reasons (e.g. we host this product and the first point of contact is in fact another business entity, so they get to decide) and apparently their MO is "you will use this ticket system no matter what you want, so only if you are a certain customer with a login it will work" whereas before you could at least write a "hello, here's a technical problem" that would reach us and not them. Ah well.
I often find myself in the bizarre situation of backing out of a suppliers website to google their contact number. A bit like when you want pricing on something without falling into a sales funnel.
sign up for the enterprise plan, get an account manager assigned to your account, request support from them, they’ll say you need to upgrade your plan to have a solutions engineer assigned to the account, upgrade your plan, then BOOM… you get your support query answered in only 3-5 business days.
I hate generic name-text-submit-forms as the only method of contact. Somehow the article makes them the definition of not a "f** off contact page" - why?
I think such forms are a direct downgrade from providing an email address.
- Responding to the submissions likely requires email anyway
- Impersonation/spam is even less difficult
- Sender isn't guaranteed to get a record of sending the message
- A faceless form with unknown machinery feels like sending messages in a bottle
Well good news, these days there's another layer. "Not even GPT4-level LLM" bots that frustrate you into giving up by circling to the FAQs over and over.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world - I noticed in SEA businesses are more like "just contact us" with a phone number directly available / facebook page. Like, they don't want you to do anything with the website, they expect you to chat with them directly.
Wow I love the design of this site. Really hit some right notes for me. If you’re going to talk about reviving the ”old web” on hn, please follow through and reach for the originality level of this. So many thoughtful details.
It has broken scrolling, very irritating. Scroll to top doesn’t work at all and when I fiddle with the fake windows regular scrolling can’t decide if the fake window or the whole page should scroll.
I hated it. It looks really pretty, but was terrible for reading. Half my phone screen was taken up by icons, and there was no scrollbar so I had no idea how long the article was. I really needed reader mode for it.
Urgh... One of the worst things, when you want to contact someone and they have hidden every means of doing so. It reflects badly on the companies that do this and questions why such pages exist to begin with. I understand why companies hate spam, but when a company hides customer service, that should be a major red flag and reeks of cowardice. Customers can and do have major problems, not just Karen type issues, but being ripped off for hundreds or even thousands. They sometimes hide behind underpaid staff who are students or can barely speak English.
It's all dependent entirely on scale. If a bajillion customers have major problems (whether actually major or in their mind), you have to triage and the first tier won't be experts with excellent command of English. Support is fucking expensive. Everyone wants bespoke service, but if you are not a customer, or if the amount of business you bring does not justify the expense, the support level you want cannot be provided in the long run.
The contact page on the left is something I absolutely hate. If the prefer method of contact is email, just give me an email.
If they need to enter that into some ticketing system, give me access to the ticketing system. The page on right give me some ideas how they handle things internally.
The form on left is almost certainly a webform-to-email, this is ridiculous.
looking at font choice, how ironic they are complaining about UX
If you put an email address on a contact page, all manner of sh*t is going to be thrown at you.
Automated marketing services, scammers, competitors, everyone and their dog are going to be filling up your customer service inbox and costing you time and money to manage it.
Put a contact form on your website and you can secure it with a capture, which is not bulltproof but it sure does filter out a lot of automated noise for you. Then you will find that people are generally a lot quicker to fire off an email than fill out a contact form. In my experience this generally puts one more 'thinking barrier' between you and the public, which again cuts down noise significantly.
Also, click the 'settings' button in the bottom right, and you will see they have given you a choice of fonts. Sometimes it pays to look a tiny bit further to see whether your issue has already been solved, before complaining about it.
Great post! And I must admit that this must be the best website I've encountered in ages. The mix of oldschool OS with the pixelated font.. Perfect!
Communicating process is a top-notch hint. Getting everyone involved in meetings to the have the same context and expectations about the common goals is never easy.
75 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 64.3 ms ] threadI think an honest message like this, at least communicated via email to the budget owners would abscond... or at least absolve one of any guilt.
Also, thank you for having the option to toggle the font. I wrote a css rule, but found it later.
The only thing I see is the design equivalent of over-engineering a car with bells and whistles that nobody gives a shit about, it's simply showing off and sending a signal to other designers, which is obviously fine if that's what you're going for, but personally I hate it (as you may suspect, my job is not in design).
When it comes to providing an enjoyable blog post reading experience, it really does creep into the "fuck off" territory for me, though.
Good luck trying to reach a human for support on google, one of the most rich companies in history, that permeates virtually every aspect of life.
Folks, when making pixel-art styled stuff, ensure they are actually sharp on bix-pixels screen. It's not pixel-art if it's sharp only on your macbook.
Though to be fair, this is a bit rich coming from a blog that I'd describe as a "fuck off blog". This was incredibly difficult to read. I'm all for people doing whatever they want with their site (I'm guilty of doing ornery things on my site because I enjoy it and the aesthetic), but I find the irony palpable.
Regarding the communicative iterations where you desperately (read: hopelessly) try to convince a client otherwise as they demand something unreasonable; 100% on-point. In my consultations with a close friend I've found that it's not only hard, but interpersonally challenging to say "no" to someone when you're either being compensated by them or in some personal relationship with them that you don't want to jeopardize. The best advice I've recieved regarding business operations is "don't do business with friends", and I imagine this kind of situation is one of the biiggest reasons why. Someone being set on a terrible idea and relying on you to implement it is not pleasant. My experience with this to date has been informal, but I'd imagine that once legal contracts are involved it becomes hair loss-tier stressful to deal with.
If I was hiring them I might well start ignoring them at this point as well - thy are literally proposing only implementing only one of the three methods, and the most simple one at that.
I assume I've determined that customers want ready access to some questions. I assume that I have a physical location customers want to see.
Proposing to ditch these is preposterous. I could see proposing inlining the contract form. I could see using more neutral terms ('get in touch' vs 'contract our sales team').
That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.
Hetzner team if you are reading this, although I love email platform, is there any way that your support stops being AI (which annoyed me) but rather you can have an discord,matrix (preferred),telegram, heck IRC or even slack for what its worth where I can message the team if I wanted a custom solution on top of hetzner etc.
Fwiw, Upcloud provided support and heard me out even if I didnt share my credit card info so massive respects to them and I am sure that my experience with hetzner has always been positive (they responded to me once on hackernews which was peak) but maybe if they are reading this (then hello!) and yea, please hetzner I hope you change your contact page to be more suitable or hear my complaints as I like hetzner a lot too
Personally, I am starting to value contact support which I thought didn't matter a lot nowadays. It doesn't matter if its cheap or not but rather if I can talk to their team once about any product and see if I can match their terms of service and similar basically or other issues in general too.
Also Hetzner, another point, I would love to be able to write articles for you and get the 50$ (I will read it again to see if I can "write" according to the conditions but yea) and similar but once again I need a hetzner account which required credit card/debit card validation.
The author isn't generically ranting against contact pages that redirect you to support documentation — they're pointing out that this customer wasn't considering the customer behaviour they wanted and instead followed a trend. In this case, it was counter to what they wanted the customer to do.
Both versions of the Contact page have issues. The author's version (with only a form) doesn't let you specify whether you want to contact sales, support, or other. Once submitted, you have no way of knowing whether it succeeded, or who it got sent to (as opposed to sending an email, which will at least bounce if it's a bad address).
As for the client's version of the page, the only way of contacting a human is to get in touch with the sales team, which in my experience is all but useless if you need support. (Also "Reach out to..." is corporate doublespeak, and it's not immediately obvious what will happen when you click that button: mailto? tel? Input form? Other?) There's nothing more annoying than hunting for, say, a company's address, clicking the "Contact" link, and having it mailto instead of giving you the info you need.
Sometimes (like here) there are even some good reasons (e.g. we host this product and the first point of contact is in fact another business entity, so they get to decide) and apparently their MO is "you will use this ticket system no matter what you want, so only if you are a certain customer with a login it will work" whereas before you could at least write a "hello, here's a technical problem" that would reach us and not them. Ah well.
sign up for the enterprise plan, get an account manager assigned to your account, request support from them, they’ll say you need to upgrade your plan to have a solutions engineer assigned to the account, upgrade your plan, then BOOM… you get your support query answered in only 3-5 business days.
I think such forms are a direct downgrade from providing an email address.
- Responding to the submissions likely requires email anyway
- Impersonation/spam is even less difficult
- Sender isn't guaranteed to get a record of sending the message
- A faceless form with unknown machinery feels like sending messages in a bottle
(including you, Google).
https://www.nicchan.me/art/
Here's your Facebook page to talk to all of your friends. Oh, you got banned? TOO BAD
The form on left is almost certainly a webform-to-email, this is ridiculous.
looking at font choice, how ironic they are complaining about UX
If you put an email address on a contact page, all manner of sh*t is going to be thrown at you.
Automated marketing services, scammers, competitors, everyone and their dog are going to be filling up your customer service inbox and costing you time and money to manage it.
Put a contact form on your website and you can secure it with a capture, which is not bulltproof but it sure does filter out a lot of automated noise for you. Then you will find that people are generally a lot quicker to fire off an email than fill out a contact form. In my experience this generally puts one more 'thinking barrier' between you and the public, which again cuts down noise significantly.
Also, click the 'settings' button in the bottom right, and you will see they have given you a choice of fonts. Sometimes it pays to look a tiny bit further to see whether your issue has already been solved, before complaining about it.
Communicating process is a top-notch hint. Getting everyone involved in meetings to the have the same context and expectations about the common goals is never easy.