I do these brief usability reviews to highlight what NOT to do in your products, web sites, applications, etc. that you might be working on; also, so you can chuckle about some of the odd things that are done on web sites...

I was browsing podcasts at PodShow.com tonight as I was interested in adding a few new podcasts to my subscription collection.

I found an interesting podcast so I clicked it. It started to play.

No! I want to subscribe (ideally directly in iTunes). I right click, stupidly, and get the standard browser right click behavior (hey! a guy could hope!).

I spot a button labeled "+GET"

I don't know why there's text "Here it comes" on the tooltip, but I clicked the button anyway.

Wow, the power of the web. This is a multimedia page with video, and JavaScript galore, and users are presented with that? Signup to do this. Do what? Why not take me to a signup page? Or show me where a signup page might be?

I now see this after hunting around the page (it looked like an advertisement, so I totally ignored it, and it was scrolled above the fold):

I'm still not clear why I'd want to sign up. I'm amazed it will take exactly thirty-one seconds to register, so, of course, I clicked the ad (as this will be so fast I won't know what I'm doing!):

Ah ha. Finally an explanation of what the heck I'm signing up for.

Summary:

• Free videos. OK. I like free! I'm not willing to pay a dime for any of the podcasts I watch. I don't mind that they have a few ads to help pay the podcasters though.
• Music and Videos for my ipod (not an iPod mind you). Do these cost money though? There are some free videos, because you just told me so, but these aren't?
• Find great audio SLASH video shows. They're also great/good shows I guess.
• And I could upload videos to expose something? What the?

OK.

So, how about I sign up then ...

(I hit submit to see what would happen if I left any of the fields blank).

It's in the style of the "giant" text boxes that seem to be still popular on the Web 2.0 web sites, yet they forgot to actually make the fonts inside the text boxes larger.

I don't know what a Display Name is, so who knows how that will be used.

Now, I see my profile url. The what? Underneath, there's some gray right aligned text that says, "username.podshow.com". OK, what's my username? I provided a display name, but no username. Then, if it's left blank, it switches terms yet again, and asks me to include my domain name.

Then, onto the email, which has help text that is left aligned. I know what they mean by the text they used, but is this really the best wording? It's like saying, please verify what you type and we may verify that somehow.

The best part about this whole page was the humor used for the birth date: "I think you're lying about your age." Then it suggests the date format I must use, MM/DD/YYYY, even though the date fields are drop downs, which don't allow me to deviate from a pre-fixed format. What's odd is that they tell me I'm lying about my age, yet provide the values as options.

The terms box was pre-checked, meaning its far too easy to agree to the terms without reading them.

So, I closed the browser tab and moved on. Thanks, but no thanks PodShow.com.

Maybe you should read one of the classics like About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design(which was recently updated to revision 3). (It's a love/hate relationship for most with Alan Cooper's books).