I think it is an awful design at present, no doubt about it.
It might not be fully intentional though [1]. I suspect it probably started as a more sensible form, with the top text being just the first sentence. Then they realised they got loads of refund contacts that they preferred to deal with by phone so just added the text - without realising how terrible this made the UI.
This does seem pretty cool. I have not spent too long looking at this but a few bits of initial feedback:
1. Appreciation for an informative site: I like that your website actually explains what your product does in simple terms. So many marketing sites are impossible to parse, so it's cool that this one gets to the point quickly. Bonus points for having a live demo without a sign up.
2. Dealing with uncertainty / edge cases: One worry I'd have is that this might miss things that are relevant, or doesn't capture uncertainty well. I'd probably want a default of a 'flag for a human because this doesn't fit in the boxes well' marker by default on all forms. For example, if someone responds to the conference example with 'Sure, I'll be there on Monday and I wear a size M. Also I am in a wheelchair so will need the venue to be accessible - please let me know if it's not.', I'd want to make sure this gets flagged rather than the automated system ignoring the last part (especially as people might expect humans to read the response to an email).
Yep - strongly agree that if you are going ahead with a contact form, you better QA it.
I'm not a huge fan of organisations shifting to proprietary social networks being a primary contact method (especially if it's that or a broken contact form). But hoping that the Digital Markets Act's interoperability rules might make this a better experience.
Thanks for reading the article! I agree it doesn't consider this point, and I actually hadn't thought of that.
Semi-empirically, I've run some websites with emails and contact forms sitting on them for 5+ years and I haven't noticed this effect. Although I must admit I haven't studied it quantitively well enough to determine this for certain - I'd love to look over the data to see if this is true. Unfortunately on all these inboxes spam is deleted automatically after some time so I no longer have records. If you do have data here, it'd be great to see someone publish this and would happily add a link to this analysis!
And theoretically, would a contact form link not also be a thing that gets added to more and more lists over time and have the same problem? (Although I also didn't notice this pattern on contact forms, so I'm not claiming this does happen - just a thought experiment on this logic!)
The contact form is linked in the article [1], and it rejects genuinely valid emails. You can try it yourself and see it doesn't have greyed examples, and that the problem is not example.com but the use of symbols. For example, greffe_acces@montréal.ca is a valid in-use email [2] that is rejected.
example.com was only used to take an example screenshot.
It might not be fully intentional though [1]. I suspect it probably started as a more sensible form, with the top text being just the first sentence. Then they realised they got loads of refund contacts that they preferred to deal with by phone so just added the text - without realising how terrible this made the UI.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor