User Interface Engineering

When you’re thinking about purchasing a search keyword on Yahoo! Search, you would expect to need to supply the folks at Yahoo! all sorts of information:

• the search term
• some copy for the advertisement
• the page to link to
• billing information
• credit card information

But, would you expect to have to supply your time zone? After all, what difference does it make which time zone you’re located in? Do they use it for pricing? For tracking you in some way?

When we ask users questions they don’t expect, they often become suspicious. It’s like when a cashier at the local store asks for your home phone number—you have to wonder what they are going to do with that information.

The designers at Yahoo! obviously don’t want you to get suspicious of their time zone request. They’ve done a nice job of explaining exactly why:

Not only do they tell us why they need the time zone information—for timing campaigns and accurately reporting your activity—but they also warn us we won’t have a chance to edit it later, so we best get it right from the outset.

Are you explaining all your information requests to your users?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 9:24 am and is filed under Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.