Clearly Business Requirements Trumped User Requirements

“ Imagine having to swipe your credit card before you can walk into a retail location. Imagine giving them your email address before picking up a catalog. That’s what Pottery Barn hopes you’ll do when you download their free iPad catalog app.

PixelMags may make a great catalog engine for iPad, or then again, they may not. I didn’t bother to create the mandatory account in order to find out.

Pottery Barn’s mistake is not in selecting a platform like PixelMags. Their mistake is requiring account creation as an entry-point for the experience. This needs to come almost last, just before a user orders something through the catalog.

Clearly business requirements trumped user requirements. ”

Joe Pemberton posting his observations on the new Pottery Barn catalog app for the iPad in the post Brands in the Mobile Space: Pottery Barn, Your Business Requirements Are Showing, at Idlemode.

I see this almost everywhere – and it makes me crazy! Sign up is the first thing you want me to do?! I have to say along with embracing the cross-platform way of things, this is one of the things I love about Twitter on the iPhone. They bought a 3rd-party app (Tweetie), and the first thing they did when they made it “Twitter for the iPhone” is allow you to use it without a Twitter account or even logging in. I think most apps / sites should be this way.