ccgfarmer |
As a new user, I've got to put in my two cents on this one:
I agree 100% that this site really stinks. The fact that they have a tutorial to use a message-board site is a huge red flag. I think an allegory is most apropos to demonstrate what I mean:
Imagine calling a company and getting a message that tells you the hours of operation, the address of the store, the products they carry, a brief history of their company and the owners favorite color and cake flavor before giving you the option to type in a number for the department you wish to speak to. Once you've selected a department, you learn about the daily dance step, the super new employee they've hired and a great new promotion for getting free sock puppets before they give you a list of help options you can select. Pressing the closest thing to the help option you need then gets you an auto-attendant who can't understand you when they ask you to speak the name of the person you need. Since you don't know who you need to speak to, you say "operator", "anybody" and finally lose your cool and scream "HUMAN!!!" into the phone before you get public-domain hold music and a prompt to leave a message after the beep because it's now 5:01 and they close at 5:00. Most people would just want to press '0' in the beginning, hoping it'll send them to an operator. When it starts the entire message over, they usually cuss at the phone, press another number (which doesn't work) and then listen to the entire message so they're seething by the time they reach a person to ask a simple question. However you navigate through these kinds of phone messages, most people hate them more than pulling out their own fingernails with rusty tweezers, and they never make us trust the company more when we've finally gotten through the crap to reach someone.
Well, Paizo's website is that long and drawn-out introductory message that you have to wade through to get information or place an order. For those who have navigated through the sludge already, you might know that the best combination to reach an operator is pressing '7-2-5-5-4-3-0-9' and you don't mind now because you've done it before.
For us new guys, we too-often get frustrated with trying to navigate through the bloated introductory message to get what we're looking for and we go to a competing business who's message is, "Thanks for calling WotC! Please hold while we get you to a customer service rep!"...and we follow that company because we don't need a degree in message-board navigation to get help there.
This allegory is what Paizo's website is: a bloated introductory message without clear understanding of how to wade through it. We may try to get through it once or twice, getting more and more frustrated each time, but we may just as easily give up go to a competitor.
The website is the first glance at a company's product for so many customers these days! For Paizo, they have a great product that is put in a bloated, text-heavy, unfriendly package that is their website.
As someone who's studied the customer response to digital and tangible packaging (I ran multiple retail stores for 15 years), I think Paizo has a great product, but they're shooting themselves in the foot by not understanding how their digital packaging is affecting them. They don't need to take away all the context, just make it so the main stuff is easy to get to and the first thing people see...and those who don't mind spending hours looking through charts, studying possible min-max PC combos, try to grasp every rule, every piece of equipment, and every spell can find all the information they need by pressing their secret number combo to get to the right party. For those folks, a bloated Paizo site is nothing to navigate through and for the simple-minded folks like me, we can get to the information we want without wading through a pool of sludge...or the bloated introductory message that is their website.