Greetings from inside the SEOigloo!
A couple of days ago, I was assisting a client with getting her business listed in Google’s Local Business Center and Yahoo’s Local service. This client is a medical services provider with admirable skills in her profession, yet not terribly comfortable with technology, so part of our contract with her was to walk her, step by step, through getting some business listings going. She and I were both keen on getting everything just right, and in total, the process took about 2 hours of phone consulting time.
On both Google and Yahoo’s local registration forms, we encountered such a silly problem, I wanted to make a note of it here. One of the options in both of these listings is to specify what types of payment the business accepts. In this case, the client accepts both cash and checks, but the radio buttons provided in the form made it impossible for her to choose these options. She could either pick:
Cash Only
or
Personal Checks
There was no option for just ‘cash’, and if she picked ‘cash only’, she wasn’t allowed to also pick ‘personal checks’. What is that only doing in there? I imagine that millions of businesses accept credit cards AND checks AND cash. It’s very odd that the designers of these registration forms didn’t predict that all these bases would need to be covered. Usability experts and analysts…where are you? I’d like to see this fixed. It made the process confusing and frustrating for my client who wanted to be sure she was getting her listing just right. In the end, she had to pick ‘personal checks’, having to omit that she takes cash. As this isn’t an accurate representation of her business, Google Maps and Yahoo Local are missing pieces of the picture and their users will be, too.
How’s about a new radio button for ‘cash’?