Hotmail: Most Annoying Registration Interface Ever (or not?)

Awhile back I needed to sign up for a hotmail account. Yes, hotmail. The last time I used that was around 1999. I had to sign up again so I could test some HTML emails. Most of our students use either hotmail or gmail, so the easiest thing to do is just to sign up for accounts and test them that way. Gmail is no problem - I already have an account.

So I went to sign up for a hotmail account, thinking it would be a relatively simple procedure. Was I ever wrong about that!

The sign-up process

Disclaimer: When I attempted to go through this registration this morning, I got a completely different registration form than the one that currently appears (as of Tuesday evening). I think it’s possible they were changing it when I was getting the error messages I described below. Either that or I just got a different form because I was using Opera on Windoze. Most of these problems apply to the new form as well

The new form no longer requires reloading to validate, but also no longer indicates which fields are required. The new form adds the full birth date (instead of just birth year), and your time zone.

The Hotmail (now branded “Windows Live Mail”) sign up process is a whopping 5 pages long. First you decide if you want to pay for additional services (yeah right). Then you get to the sign up page. Since there are so many millions of people on hotmail, you’d think they would have a way to suggest a username that hasn’t been taken. Nope, sorry. Keep guessing till you find one that works. Of course, this feedback doesn’t happen until you submit the whole form.

This lengthy form includes your usual username, password, and password recovery sections, followed by a section for your full name, gender, birth year, and country/province/postal code. Why does Microsoft need to know that to give me an email address? All of the fields in the address section are required, including your birth year. What happens if you try to put in a fake address? That’s right, validation errors on submit. It even checks to make sure your postal code matches your province. The secret here, of course, is to pick some random smaller country that they won’t have validation information for.

No fake answers!

But there’s a catch - when I select Angola as my country and submit, the validation page comes up with the fields reset to Canada. And, of course, each time this happens you have to fill out the password field again. Microsoft also insists on validating the birth year. I could not be born in 4444, or 1589. Sometimes it just says “Please verify that you have entered the correct information”. Gee, that’s helpful. Oops, now I get a “We are working to fix a temporary problem with our sign-up service.” error. What??? Probably because I kept having to resubmit the form a million times to get the information right

So, Microsoft has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to force you to give them your actual personal information. In the fine print next to the personal information section it says “This information helps us personalize your Windows Live experience.” Okkaaayyyy. What if I don’t want my experience to be “personalized”? What if I want to protect my personal information? What if I don’t want you spying on me you bastards?

Now this section says “Your location information can be used to help reset a forgotten password.” Isn’t that interesting. They already had a password helper question. Smells like bullshit to me.

Further thoughts: It is a bit paranoid to be fussy about entering my postal code, but it is in combination with my full name. And I checked - they do include this information for birth dates after 1991 (without any extra alerts or instructions … unless maybe they do that in IE, I don’t know). Children are often less discerning about these things too. They know your full name, roughly where you live, your birth date, and whatever you enter into your emails. What could they do insteaed? Just ask you what name you want displayed with your emails. Doesn’t have to be your real name, doesn’t have to be a full name, and it can be anonymous.

The user experience

Why in the world do people go through this! It’s unbelievable. And yet, most of the emails we see from students here are hotmail addresses. It is interesting that the example under Birth Year is 1999!

There is no example under birth year on the new form. It is interesting that they have drop-downs for month and day but not year, especially since they are insisting that I enter a valid one.

Once I finally got the form right (half an hour later), I saw a screen asking me to activate my account. Of course I click “activate” without reading what’s on the screen. This will come back to haunt me later. Then there is the obligatory Terms of Service and one of those annoying how many newsletters can you get me to sign up for screens.

The terms of service is now included in the registration form, not on a separate page. The registration process is now 4 pages instead of 5.

Follow up - what happens next?

I actually did sign up for an account back before Christmas to test some HTML emails. Today I had to test some new ones, so I attempted to log in to my hotmail account. This is what happened:

Oh, right! That’s the activate account screen I agreed to when I first signed up. Turns out that you can’t use hotmail if you’re just going to use it once in awhile. No, they want to make you sign in every 30 days - sooner if you’ve just got a new account.

I’m not sure if this screen exists anymore. Now the third screen in the process just tells you that the address is ready to use at any time. Of course, I have used my account recently so I can’t go back and check again.

Microsoft is just so out of touch

Now, I imagine they might have good reasons for some of these things. Some of these measures may help prevent people from abusing their services. However these are very severe restrictions on the user experience. This isn’t what the web is about anymore. It’s not about forcing users to do things your way, and preventing them from having any control or freedom, or forcing them to give you their personal information. It’s about the total opposite - empowering users. The reason why some of the so-called “web 2.0″ companies (and google) have done so well is that they make things seamless. It’s easy and elegant, and it makes things easier for people.

On the other hand….

I can sort of see how things like this happen. I know we’ve put in a number of restrictions in the forums to stop spammers. Unfortunately, they have put some small restrictions on regular members. However, we do stop short at anything that would really hurt the user experience. We do our best to find solutions to the spam problems without annoying everyone. There’s definitely a balance to be found there

Testing HTML emails

Yes, I know there is a service that can test your emails and show how they would display in different email clients. I think we will be looking into that when we redesign the newsletter in the spring. For now, the HTML we are using is very basic so I didn’t feel it would be worth it to pay for a service to test them.

An apology: I do apologize for all the mistakes in this email. I am still not sure what happened with that form - if they changed right when I posted this or if I was just fed something different because I’m on Opera. I hope you will all continue to read my posts here, despite the mistakes

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