What Not to Do on a Website
Today I was browsing the web, wasting a little time, when it occurred to me to search online for information about a product I use almost every day, Cloralex. I know that chlorine is a toxic halogen element, so it is not the main ingredient in the cleaner I use; it must be some compound derived from that element. I was curious to know which one and how toxic it was. During my search, I found the official Cloralex website for Mexico (http://www.cloralex.com.mx/) and assumed it would be the best place to find information about the product’s ingredients. I did not find the information I was looking for, but I found something more valuable: a perfect example of how deplorable web development is in Mexico and of the things one must not do on a website:
1. Do not use Flash. Flash is a plug-in technology. If a website is developed with it, one is assuming that every user has this plug-in installed on every device, which is not true. I was browsing on my iPad and could not access the site. The developers did not even have the decency to create a script that, in the absence of the plug-in, would redirect the user to another version of the site or tell them that they needed to download it. That cannot be done on most mobile devices anyway, but it would at least explain why the user cannot see the site. Normally, when I encounter a Flash site, I close it automatically and never visit it again. On this occasion, however, I suspected I would find more faults, so I took out my Mac. Although I do not have Flash installed, I opened the site with Google Chrome, which has its own version of the plug-in built in.
2. Slow site download time. One characteristic of sites developed with Flash is that they take a long time to load. The browser must first download the entire Flash file before it can open it and, while we wait as though we had nothing better to do, a progress bar usually appears showing what percentage of the site has downloaded. In the case of this website, the download time was so painfully slow that after waiting two minutes, I began writing this article. But do not take my word for it; let us turn instead to the evidence. Using a simple web application (http://webwait.com/) to measure website download times, I ran a test comparing the Cloralex site with my personal site. To prepare the test, I cleared the browser cache and opened both sites. My personal site took 2.15 seconds to open. The Cloralex website registered 20.71 seconds—not to open, but to begin showing the progress bar, which the application detected as though the site had opened. When I saw that this test would not give me the real time, I decided to run a manual test to determine how much time elapsed between the start of the progress bar and the opening of the site. They were the most boring 5 minutes and 32 seconds of my life. This shows that when a user wants to access the Cloralex website, they must first spend 21 seconds staring at a completely blank screen and wondering what is happening, followed by more than 5 minutes watching a progress bar before finally accessing the site. If we focus only on the first 21 seconds… they are an eternity. Twenty-one seconds is an eternity on today’s web. It might have been normal in ’94, but today it is far too long. Most users have very little tolerance when browsing; if they see no progress within 10 seconds, they close the page. And after those 21 seconds, more than 5 minutes of waiting still remain. UNBELIEVABLE.
The tests were performed on a 4MB/s connection with nothing else being downloaded at the time.
3. Terrible user experience. After almost 6 minutes from the attempt to enter the site until it became available comes the worst part: searching for the information. It turns out that different products can be selected to visit their dedicated pages, so I chose the product they call “Rendidor,” the regular Cloralex one buys in the shop. The product’s dedicated page begins loading again, and this time I was so angry and annoyed that I did not even bother timing it. I left it downloading in a tab while I continued writing this article. I wrote and added the images from point one, Do not use Flash, through these lines I am writing at this very moment, and the download bar has not even reached halfway. I am going to the Oxxo to buy a soda and will come back to see whether it has finished downloading.
I have returned from the Oxxo. The site still has not downloaded, although it is close. I am becoming desperate and do not want to use any other internet service so as not to consume any of the bandwidth and to see how long this subpage takes to open.
It finally finished. There is a menu bar with several options. The one that caught my attention most is called articles, but as you may suppose, it has no articles… oh no, wait, it does. What happened is that I waited 20 seconds and the screen remained blank, so I assumed there were no articles, and while I was writing this paragraph, they appeared. Well, at least one did. I have no idea whether there are more, because it is not clear whether several exist or how to navigate between them. Every time I press a button or an arrow, one of two things happens: either nothing happens, or something happens after 20 seconds.
I am so fed up with this site that I am no longer interested in continuing to search for the information I came to find. I do not even have the time… I have closed the site forever.
Out of curiosity, I decided to test the page of what may be the main competitor in chlorine-based cleaners, Clorox. Its website downloaded in 1.18 seconds.
The site had an interface that was perhaps simpler, but much easier to understand and navigate. I found more information about the brand and the range of products they sell, as well as the available sizes.
Mental note: buy Clorox on my next trip to the supermarket.