Conversion Matters

I’m off to Europe for a month next week, and consequently I’ve been looking for travel insurance and it’s really the first time I’ve had to look for insurance - Aside from student insurance for uni!I figured it would be pretty pointless searching for ‘cheap travel insurance’ or something similar as all I’d get would be a load of hyper-optimised crap.Consequently I thought I’d give the aggregators a shot. I tried MoneySuperMarket, confused and something called SquareMouth.

SquareMouth

SquareMouth, weird name by the way, where who I looked at first. It was super quick getting my quote but they were ridiculously expensive? One was £307.80 ?!?! That’s almost as much as my month long interrail ticket!

So they ruled themselves out instantly.

The site reminded me of an OS Commerce site or something too, maybe a directory, I’m not entirely sure but it feels pretty dated.

Confused

I was pretty annoyed with the confused website.

Firstly, the quote form was in a popup. How unnecessary is that? I’ve got about 50 tabs open. I LIKE having it all in one window.

They also insisted that I had to give them my email address, “no we’re not spammers, honest gov”. Yeh so I’ll be expecting lots of ‘reminders’ about their ‘great offers’ and other crap.

The email thing was particularly annoying as the other sites I looked at didn’t ask for my address.

Their tab indexing was all over the place! Yeh so, maybe you should try tabbing through your quote forms next time you change the order of the questions…

Some people have a phobia of using the mouse - it’s trackpad at most here…

MoneySuperMarket

Onto the most offensive site but also the one, ironically I’m likely to get my travel insurance from.They have the most god-awful quote button I’ve ever seen. Did they get a 3 year old chipmunk in on work experience week? I could have puked a better button myself. It’s like < blink >BUY OUR QUOTE< /blink > but worse.

Check it out:

These pictures don’t actually do the badness enough justice, I can assure when it’s flashing every half a second it’s the worst eye sore.

I can’t believe that such a massive, successful(?) company can employ designers/project managers who think that kind of button is decent and is going to help increase conversions.

What the fuck were they thinking? Have they just come back from 1999?! They might as well add a background .wav file or something too..

All things said and done though, their quotes were by far the cheapest and they’ll probably be getting my business.