Highlighting the UX mistakes that GoDaddy have made
It’s very easy to pick flaws in prototypes. It’s also easy to find problems with the user experience of most start-ups.
But how about the world’s biggest companies?
GoDaddy is a $1.7bn company that hosts more than 77 million domains. They’ve got 23 years of design iteration under their belt.
With that much time, money and data, you’d think their UX would be perfect, right?
In reality, they make mistakes like the rest of us. Here are just a few things GoDaddy could do to improve their user experience:
To be as constructive as possible, I needed to pick an area of their service which has the following characteristics:
- High traffic
- Important to their core business
- A converting page (where sales are made/lost)
Pages with these are absolute gold, because for a company of this size, a very minor improvement in the conversion rate—say, 1%—would create millions more in sales revenue.
So, I’ve selected the domain search results page.
Where should I look?
On first glance, it’s not terrible. But then after a few seconds you realise that you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at.
It’s hard to glance at this page and understand where to place your attention.
Clickable items
Ignoring those in the header, there are 22 clickable items.
Variance in CTA styles
There’s very little consistency with the CTA styles. When you show me this many on one page, how’d I know which are the most important?
Inconsistent links
There’s also an inconsistency in the links. When is something a link, and when is it not?
Let’s go deeper.
Two options… I think
Seeing as the domain I searched for isn’t available, there seems to be two options that GoDaddy are suggesting.
- Choose an alternative domain.
- Hire GoDaddy to help me buy the domain I wanted.
But why are these two options listed next to tick icons? ✅
Their mistake here is that they’ve used universally understood iconography, out of context.
It also doesn’t help that the terminology here is inconsistent too.
So what should I buy instead?
So, let’s assume that agent/broker option doesn’t appeal to me—which domain name should I buy instead?
Down here it says—very subtly: here are some great alternatives.
But, where are they?
The answer is both.
More confusingly, are the domains in the horizontal grey banner even available?
It’s hardly obvious what this even means? It actually raises more questions:
- Is the .UK available?
- Is this even a button?
- Why does this not have an ‘add to cart’ CTA?
- Are these the domains that the broker can help me get?
Plus, if the .uk of the exact domain I wanted is available, then why does the .online—which is clearly a worse domain—get a more prominent advertisement?
It just doesn’t make sense.
In conclusion (sort of)
Whilst I’ve only highlighted some of the UX mistakes on this page, hopefully it gives you some reassurance that everybody makes mistakes—even the big guys.
Wait, there’s more content like this.
Every two weeks I publish a new UX case study on some of the worlds biggest companies, on Built for Mars.
There is also a full case study on GoDaddy, here.
