Earlier when I announced my thousandtyone youtube channel I provided a link to a page that would allow the readers of this blog and the subscribers of the channel to add topics on which they want me to do videos and vote topics up or down.
The Web based system that I had used for this was Slinkset.
But then, within a couple of weeks my ADHD kicked in and I forgot the password that I had signed up with.
That should be a simple problem, right?
Having thought that, I set out to look for a forgot password link, only to find out that there was no forgot password link on the Slinkset login page. Slinkset does not seem to believe that their users will forget their passwords.
Instantly I set out to look for a support email or a contact us page on their website, only to realize that they had none.
Slinkset is an useful idea rather well implemented, but there are two major problems that I see with it.
One is the fact that the company does not seem to have a face or a personality behind it. No information on their whereabouts, no contact information, no support links and no support emails from their home page. The second is lack of basic user functionality like forgot password.
When we talk about YAGNI, Less is right and Under doing your competition by building less what becomes profoundly important is that we look at every feature we choose to skip as closely as the features we choose to build.
Skipping features is fine. Letting your customers remind you that features are important is fine too, but if you are a young and budding startup with only a handful of customers, it is also wise to see to it that you build the basic set of features and an application where you customers can function without hitting roadblocks all the time and then at-least provide them a means to reach out to you and provide you their feedback if they are stuck.
On a side note, apparently after quite a bit of Googling it turns out that Slinkset does have a help system where you can ask for help and the password reset issue is mentioned there. You can reset your password here. Makes you wonder why Slinkset chooses to make life difficult for their users when opening up their reset password functionality and making it discoverable is as easy as providing this link somewhere on their login page.
Also makes you wonder why their help is not linked from their home page.
Go figure.
Either ways, when all you are building is an application which is one page with one niche functionality, the packing, help, support, usability and discoverability make all the difference between an awesome product that you stick to or a product that you try just once.
For now, I like Slinkset and I am going to allow them to be crappy when it comes to discoverability and continue using them. I think you should too. Go try them out and see if you like them too.
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