The other night, my wife was inquiring about making an appointment somewhere and went online to find a location. I’m being vague about what type of appointment this is because I don’t want to call out the specific website that she encountered, because it had an incredibly horrid usability error. And when I say horrid, I mean it was so bad that it actually prevented a conversion from occurring. Was it a technical error? One would think so, but the error message it gave made it seem intentional.

I took a slice of a screen shot so you could see the error first hand. Check it out…

“Please check spelling of your last name” ????

What? Are you serious? Now this isn’t a login page where it’s possible she was entering an incorrect user name. This is the page you get to after clicking through from a PAID search ad on Google. Above the form it provides an offer and says “Register Now for a Free Consultation”. Clearly the purpose of this website and form is to convert visitors into customers. If this was a technical error, wouldn’t it have said something different like, “Please make sure all fields are completed”? Plus, how are they to know if we had spelled our last name incorrectly or not? Our last name could be Kashingtoniktoriley. Would that be spelled wrong? Oh, okay. Maybe they don’t think we spelled it wrong. So what do they want us to “check the spelling” for? It’s not like we are even using illegal characters. Even if we were, the error message doesn’t say that. It just asks us to “check” it.

Okay, rant over. But this is just a really funny case where had someone checked the site, not to optimize the usability, but at least make sure it was simply usable, the business could be cashing in on many more conversions.