The f*** off contact page

Summary

This post contains swear words. I’ve censored the first one, but read on at your peril! Many years ago, I had a client that sold a service. They weren’t a design agency, but for the sake of anonymity, we’ll just call them a design agency. Let us say that their core offering was a full-service design package, but they also made a substantial part of their income from doing smaller tasks related to their primary offering. These kind of services included smaller tasks like one-off campaigns or newsletter designs; tasks that their customers may very well be able to do on their own, but the prospect of freeing up some time by by offloading it to an expert was a tempting offer for many of their customers, and made up a significant chunk of their revenue. We were hired to do a complete redesign of their site from the ground up. The process went smoothly at first, all the wireframes were approved without issue, but when it came to the design phase, we began to hit walls. For example, they would stumble across sites that they liked and wanted to depart from the agreed-upon wireframes in order to implement a similar design. The problem was, they were thinking about their inspiration sites from an aesthetic point of view, not from a user experience perspective. Their decisions were coming from a place of ‘we like the balance of imagery and text in this page’ and not ‘we think this design will achieve the intended goal of the page.’ Now, you know me, I love a good singular gilded lily, but the client had unwittingly stumbled across a trap, they had fallen in love with what I call a “Fuck off contact page.” What the fuck is a ‘fuck off contact page?’A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They are usually found on the websites of million or billion dollar companies, likely Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that are trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on support by carefully hiding t...