Social Networking Annoyance at Reunion.com

I signed up at “reunion.com” some time back, and occasionally I get email from them. I went over to the site and eventually got logged in. I tried the people search function, and apparently a grade school friend was in the system, but clicking on “View Profile” merely popped up a page saying I could upgrade my account by paying them money. Not yet done exploring the system, I spent some time entering data on my profile, including the nine places I’ve lived and the three universities I’ve taken degrees at. One thing I had done was that I entered “R.” in the “Middle Name/Initial” field on the first page of profile editing. Umpteen pages later, I hit the “Done” button, and got a page informing me that I had entered an invalid character in the “Middle Name” field… and all my other data went away, too.

I went to the “About” page, and it has a link to allow email to the Reunion.com people about various issues. I thought that I would send them a suggestion:

Suggestion:

I just spent thirty minutes filling in data on where I’ve lived, gone to school, etc., only to have it ignored because I had entered “R.” in the “Middle Name” field, which apparently hates periods. I’m not inclined to spend that time again providing information for your system.

If you have “drop dead” error checking, you should partition it off so that an error there does not put the user’s effort in filling out the rest of the data at risk.

Wesley

I hit the “Continue…” button, and the next page requires filling out a bunch of fields to “register for user support”. Uh, not likely, dudes.

Reunion.com… is it a good use of time? I don’t think so. The underlying idea is good, but the user interface needs vast improvement to make it even marginally pleasant.