This fascination of hers included signing up at the Monster High website, to play games/watch videos/learn more about the characters, etc….
It was here that she found a Bug… She reported it to me, but
at the time I was a bit too busy to investigate it, so we *did what every good consumer does – we found a workaround…
This weekend my brother Joe came up to visit with his
family, and they are expecting, so the subject of Names came up… it was at this
point that I remembered the Bug. When I
mentioned to Joe that the site would not let her user name be valid due to
having “hell” in her name, he inquired about my name. My folks decided to have a “one ‘L’ Michele”,
so “hell” is not in my personal name, but I decided to test the site to see
what happened…. I selected to use “Michelle”…
The results:
This proved really interesting to me… “what an odd thing to
think about when testing,” I thought.
While I realize that foul language is unacceptable on websites for
children… who would have thought to check for this?
I would almost be willing to bet that anyone who was testing
this site had no clue that this would/should be taken into consideration… I am
sure if I were testing the site, unless there was some clue in some
documentation somewhere, that I would only have found this if I was using my
daughter’s name as a login…
Did I report this bug?
No and Yes…
Why not? Finding a
place to report it, using the online “contact us” info was far too complicated
to report a simple issue with a website… I could not find the appropriate place to report it. I found "products" to report things on, but not websites/website related content...
And, yes… I just did :)
*Side Note: I wonder why consumers are becoming 'less likely' to report issues they are having with products in general...
Are they having as hard of a time as I did to find the appropriate department to speak to? Is it too much to navigate through all the available options of Support? Do none of them quite "match" what users are thinking?
I wonder because of other recent customer support issues I have had with various products/companies...
There seems to be a lot of clutter involved in determining what department a question/issue goes to. As a consumer, I am hoping this changes some...
3 comments:
" I wonder why consumers are becoming 'less likely' to report issues they are having with products in general... "
I'm not sure if it's true that folks are less likely than before to report issues. There's an old saying in customer support that the issues you need to worry most about are the ones that customers don't report.
That said, I've seldom found it worthwhile to report a website issue. Most of the time I get no response, sometimes I get a canned response. Very seldom has my report made any difference. Workarounds are usually the most effective approach.
I once worked at a company that hosted online auctions (not eBay, but similar).
We implemented a "bad word filter" feature. What you encountered sounds like what we encountered.
What should the system do when a bad word is embedded within another word? Depends on the requirements.
When I was testing our new feature, I discovered that the word Association triggered the bad word filter. As did Quality Assurance.
Hi Joe,
I had never thought of a "bad word filter" before my daughter's experience... I certainly will now think about things like this. The amount of names impacted, especially with the liberal spelling of things, could be high... Especially when adding the obvious "bad word" in assurance... then take into account that a lot of products/services/applications go multi-national... I agree on websites... but I think that is what fuels the public to look for workarounds first... I think you kinda make my point, but reveal to me that it likely has existed for longer than I have :)
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