Hey, I just had an interesting experience where I forwarded the link to the new Wayfinder to my gaming group. Sadly, though many were interested, the number who successfully downloaded it on the first try was low (and pretty much all of them work in tech!).
First, you have to "add to my downloads" rather than just download it. Annoying but they all got that.
But then, the My Downloads page tripped them up. They report, "Download is greyed out, and there's some message about 'An Important Notice Regarding Wizards of the Coast PDFs!' I don't understand." Several of them interpreted "Personalize this file" as some option they didn't want; maybe choosing what chapters to put in it, or, in the words of one guy, "add a smiley face or some crap to it." For new users it's not very clear that personalize means "we want to watermark it before you download it, this is a mandatory step."
I would suggest that you change the personalize/download step somehow. I know it says you have to personalize first in the text at the top, but that's not working on all users, and you don't want abandons on freebies that can get future customers.
Why is "download" separate, why not have the first download click personalize? Or why not have a mouseover, or maybe when you click download it says "personalize first!" (Or maybe just run the personalize...) or change the "Personalize" word to "Prepare file for download" or something. "Personalization" usually has an implication of usefulness for the user; really you're just watermarking to prevent piracy so it's a bit of a mental stretch.
Anyway, my experience indicates that you may be having substantial dropoff for first-timers trying to download a PDF, and some reengineering of the page might help that.
It's based off the purchase process, which probably means they can't do it all in one step, or it would be too much work to change it so it works in one step).
A mouseover personalisation would mean you'd personalise a lot of stuff you don't need just by moving the curser over it, something that would waste a lot of cpu cycles.
(Oh, and I'm a tech guy and understand it just fine, so please give me their bosses' adresses so I can tell them to fire the guys. ;-P)
Chief Technical Officer
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Those of you who have been buying PDFs for a while might recall that it used to actually be a true two-step process that required you to first click step one, wait a bit, and then click step two. Now, clicking step one will automatically execute step 2 at the appropriate time in most browsers. It's not something we can easily make into a true single-click process at this time.
And it's not just watermarking—"personalizing" also includes copying the files to a special area that's available only for you, and zipping them up, so it's a multi-step process even for non-watermarked files.
They did'nt understand it ? Then i guess tech isn't the right job choice for them....i mean c'mon! I'm a total losser if it comes to tech and i am not a native-english-speaker but i still somehow managed to understand the download process and what personalyzing means....