Staples.com: Yeah, we've got problems

Broken Requirements

Mind you, I wasn’t doing anything that requires them to remember me. All I did is enter a term in their search box. It’s obviously possible to show me matching products without requiring me to accept a cookie.

This appears to be a case of a poorly thought-out site design. Because you need the user to accept cookies in order for them to add items to your cart, you might as well put that requirement right up front, right?

The problem is, Staples didn’t think of all the reasons someone might be using their site. Just because I’m searching for products doesn’t mean I intend to buy them immediately. I might be doing product research by evaluating what my options are before I make a purchase. Shopping is a process and not every search will lead to an immediate purchase.

Staples has several shopping channels available. They have stores that I can walk into, a catalog I can browse, a phone number I can call, and a Web site I can visit. It doesn’t occur to them that I might want to use more than one of these channels to make a purchase. I might want to look up pricing and availabilty on the Web site but drive over to the store to complete the sale. By erecting barriers in front of one of their channels, they have effectively eliminated it.

Could you imagine if you were only allowed to call a company’s toll-free number if planned on making a purchase? What if the phone checked to see that you had your wallet with you before an operator would answer the line? That’s silly, but it’s effectively what Staples is doing on their Web site. Don’t have the minimum requirements to place an order? Then we won’t even let you know what products we have.

Staples should allow you to search and view products without requiring the use of cookies. Enhancing the user experience through personalization is a great goal, but not at the expense of a poor or non-existant experience if personalization isn’t available. If the user has cookies enabled, use them and provide a personalized shopping session. If they don’t, give them a stripped down store that allows them to accomplish their tasks.

Writing Effective Error Messages

To make matters worse, there’s nothing about my browser that prevents it from accepting cookies. I use The Proxomitron filtering proxy to strip certain personal information out of cookies to protect my privacy and security. If someone wants to store my email address, name, or credit card numbers in a cookie, my filters will kill the cookie before it ever gets written. But the proxy and my browser will let most cookies pass through.

That means there’s an apparently bug in Staples’ cookie checking mechanism. Whatever system they are using to determine if I can accept cookies is flawed in some way.

But that’s not what the error message says. The message, probably written by a software engineer, assumes that everything on their end is fine and blames the failure on me.

Software shouldn’t blame the user for the problem. Doing so only serves to frustrate and demoralize the user. Even if the fault lies with the user, you should provide gentle hints about the right way to do things without implying that they did something wrong.

Staples tries to provide assistance in enabling cookies, but falls well short of their goal. After the error message is a link that says “For instructions on enabling cookies for several popular browsers, click here.“

The link directs the user to a section of their FAQ that explains what cookies are and why you need them to use the Staples site. The FAQ provides instructions for enabling cookies in what Staples apparently considers popular browsers: Internet Explorer 3 and 4 and Netscape 3 and 4, all on Windows.

I’m not privy to their site statistics, but unless they have some rather unique traffic patterns, those browsers aren’t commonly used on their site. The 3.0 versions of IE and Netscape were released in August 1996, and the 4.0 versions were first released in the summer and fall of 1997. According the TheCounter.com, the 4.x versions of each browser accounted for just 1% of Internet traffic in January 2003, and the 3.x versions didn’t generate enough traffic to even register.

Internet Explorer 5 was released in March of 1999. What this tells me is that the Staples cookie FAQ has been ignored by their content management team for the last four years.

The instructions Staples provides for managing your cookies are given for Windows browsers only, although that fact isn’t mentioned in the FAQ. The information is presented as if it were the only way of doing things and users of other platforms such as Macintosh and Linux might be confused by these instructions.

The lesson here is that if your error messages give the user help in troubleshooting the problem, make sure that the troubleshooting guide is up to date. If the guide isn’t comprehensive or only provides instructions for a particular platform or version of your software, be sure to explain that.