User Interface Peeve: Giving the User No Options to Skip an Unwanted Step
Thursday
Jun 21, 2007
Here’s one UI peeve of mine. It’s when a web application–or any software for that matter–asks you for something, and gives you no option otherwise.
Take for instance tagged.com. After signing in with your desired username, password and other details, it will then ask you for your web mail credentials (in my case Gmail) so it can send invites to everyone on your list (read: spam everyone!).
One correction. Initially, one would think that the point of submitting your webmail credetnials is for Tagged to check if any of your contacts is already on their database. It’s in the wording, after all:
Enter your password and we’ll search your address book for friends on Tagged.
However, it appears that my first hunch is correct. The point of this is for you to allow Tagged to spam EVERYONE on your contact list. See here.
What bugs me is that they don’t give users the option to NOT harvest your mail contacts. First thing that popped in my mind was this could be a phishing site. Had I not known better, I would have just keyed in my Gmail password. I wonder how many users had been fooled into doing just that.
Tagged should have given me the option of skipping this step, much like other social networks. I would rather just invite friends after I’ve tested the waters and determined whether the service is worth sending email invites/solicitations to people.
J. Angelo Racoma is a technology journalist and blogger. See more of his blog posts here at racoma.com.ph, commentaries at racoma.net, and Twitter feed at @jangelo.
Comments
vance
June 21st, 2007 at 1:10 am
I guess its scam site. It would be better for them to let you give the invites to anyone you like rather than forcing themselves to distribute their site invites.
thanks for the warning..
J. Angelo Racoma
June 21st, 2007 at 2:55 am
Looks like it’s a phishing site, indeed. Be warned!
vance
June 21st, 2007 at 4:19 am
By the way, no decent web service will ask for your email account password. So Yah its a phising site.
ia
June 21st, 2007 at 4:50 am
Vance, lots of web applications ask for your email address and its password and it’s okay — so long as they explicitly tell you they want access to your address book and you’ve agreed. I see lots of applications accessing other site accounts these days especially because of the public APIs they’re releasing. Examples: blog posting + Flickr; Twitter + TwitterFeed/Twittervision/any other Twitter mashup out there; Facebook + Facebook apps.
I think I’ve subconsciously marked Tagged as spam in my Yahoo! account because I really don’t want to join another social network. I’m sure their behavior can be remedied by a blog backlash, especially by the big Web 2.0 guys. Has anybody from TechCrunch or Mashable! blogged about this yet? I’d be surprised if they didn’t.
vance
June 21st, 2007 at 2:11 pm
@ia ah I see. Sorry about that. I thought our email account should be private for some reason. But as you said the site should explicitly tell its subscriber the specific reason on why they ask for it. I’m used to web services asking for my email account but not my email account password. So it was a first time for me to hear about this.
lisaflor
March 22nd, 2008 at 6:00 pm
hmm, has anyone seen NamesDatabase.com? I’m not really sure if it’s one of those “invasive” sites, but I do get “updates” every month, which I just delete hehe. I used a fake name, but I did use my yahoo email ad, so…