Dear Mr. Allen,
I am a fan. I really am.
Your GTD model is brilliant yet practical. It works! And I like that you focus on helping people have a better life. That’s a much more compelling message than “time management”. Clearly you’re a bright guy with the best of intentions.
That’s why I can’t understand why you’ve allowed your website to be designed the way it is. The experience it offers is not at all what I expected after reading your book. It’s beyond frustrating.
Specifically, I’m referring to the Free Articles portion of your site. (The rest is fine.) Here’s the problem. It’s inconvenient and difficult for people to benefit from your free articles because they’re in a secure shopping cart:
Putting a BUY button next to a free product is confusing. But it gets worse. Your shopping cart is (at least in my experience) cumbersome. It took me several attempts to get it to work. It wasted my time.
Most free information on the Internet is easy and convenient to acquire. You just point and click. Some requires registration. But most is as frictionless as our current technology will allow.
When you put roadblocks between your visitors (also known as customers) and your product, you increase the odds they’ll leave and not come back. I understand free means they don’t pay. But free also means you’re building an audience. The benefit of free is you spread your ideas and goodwill to more people.
But putting your free articles behind a clumsy shopping cart changes things. Because when you charge a visitor the price of time and hassle you’ve just increased their cost of doing business with you. Your free products are no longer free.
If your intent is to share your ideas, spread the wealth of knowledge and build your community, then your current Free Articles page is not helping. It’s hurting.
The good news is, your fix is simple. Remove the barriers. Make it easy and convenient for people to acquire your articles. Then they can move on to others things, like getting better at Getting Things Done.
Sincerely,
Kevin Stirtz
The Amazing Service Guy
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m not familiar with the site you mentioned or its author. Having read your post, I looked at their site to see if I shared your opinion. I do.
The shopping cart thing for free articles is frustrating, but more frustrating to me was I couldn’t find the free articles in the first place. Of course, they’re in the middle of page and once found are obvious. The problem was I kept looking at the main navigation or searching for a prominent button somewhere.
It might be a lesson in design we all should heed. If free articles are offered, do we expect to easily find them? And if so, do we expect them to be readily readable? I believe so.
My conclusion is the site’s author doesn’t use the free articles as a lead attraction or nurturing tactic. If that’s the case, then what they’re doing is OK.
Interesting.
Jim – good point about their intent. Given Mr Allen’s celebrity-like status, he does not need a bunch of free articles to draw traffic to his website. But I would suggest making them difficult to get at (even once you find them) is still a mistake. It would be better to offer no free articles than to make them hard to get. “Hard to get” creates a bad user experience. I doubt that’s their intent.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Great post Kevin! I’m a GTD fan too, but I haven’t spent much time on the site. I’m interested to see if/how David Allen responds.
Same here. GTD is such a great model I hate to see it tainted (even a little) by a hard to use website. Thanks for reading Tim!