A few times in the past month I’ve received responses from people at the companies/services that I’ve blogged about. It’s good to see that this new wave of Web companies are paying attention to the blogosphere. In this case the response if from GotVoice regarding my complaint about the site’s usability. I did e-mail them back asking permission to repost the e-mail but have received no response. I’ve decided to post it anyway (sans names) and if they ask me to remove this I will.
Hey,
[…] at GotVoice here. The reason why we list “Home answering Machine” is that we’ve found that many users might otherwise not distinguish the difference between this option and “Home Phone voicemail”. If users select the latter but in reality have an answering machine, well then our service won’t work for them. Even though you might get disappointed that we don’t work with answering machines, if you select that option, we think it’s better than going through the entire sign-up process via the “home voicemail” option only to discover afterwards that it won’t work. We’d rather try to control expectations upfront, that’s all. It’s not perfect, but we figured it was better this way.
Best regards,
[…]
I do understand the logic they applied to the decision making process but I’m not sure I agree with it. Granted, it does address the potential users who don’t understand the difference between voicemail and an answering machine, but I’m also generally of the opinion that you can only dumb something down (for lack of a better term) before you start insulting the users who do know what they’re doing. At this point, I stick by my original opinion.
