After being asked to take surveys on www.zoomerang.com by two distinguished companies in one week, I am compelled to ask why and when did MarketTools, Inc. take such a prominent market share? Their survey software is completely unaccessible! The only button labeled properly is the “submit” button. Based on the user experience from my point of view, there is no way in … that anyone would ever dream of choosing such a service. But there you go again, its a prime case of the pretty graphic artist forgeting to look behind his visually appealing, mouse-driven page. But let me ask you, does this look pretty?

Professional
Survey/survey.zgi?p=WEB229GMVUF2Z5#
Survey/survey.zgi?p=WEB229GMVUF2Z5#
Survey/survey.zgi?p=WEB229GMVUF2Z5#
Survey/survey.zgi?p=WEB229GMVUF2Z5#
Survey/survey.zgi?p=WEB229GMVUF2Z5#

No, I thought not. Believe it or not, there are many times when such ugly pages don’t bother me. In fact, I have become quite imune to finding cgi code fragments on sites. Clickable page menus or link options are tolerable when the link does indeed take you to a new page. But not when nothing happens! These cgi buttons don’t even change. In fact, they shouldn’t even be called links because they do not link to anything other than garbage cgi code. But that’s another discussion entirely. The point is, web developers, why do you so often forget the most basic elements of alt tags and image maps on your cgi deployment?

Hopefully, MarketTools, Inc. will soon wake up to the errors of their ways and make what reportedly could be a great service for HR managers and information gatherers into a top notch service for all users. Will www.zoomerang.com uphold its dignity as the preferred survey provider or buckle to a survey provider with both outstanding statistics and reporting and good user accessibility?