Analytic Design Group

A few days ago I got an invitation to join the Konnects network of someone I know. At the time I was not a Konnects member but thought I’d join to anyway as it’s good practice to be checking out new sites and services.

Not only was the profile creation process annoyingly long and disruptive, it didn’t take me back to the invitation I was trying to respond to. In the process I kind of forgot about the invitation and got on to the more pressing issues of running a UX consulting firm.

A few days passed and I got a reminder email letting me know that the invitation was going to expire soon. So, okay, I’ll just accept the invite, right?

Nope. I click on the link in my email and get a long up-sell message to get me to move to the paid Premier service.

You’ve got to be kidding me! I was told membership was free, my profile (according to the little bar graph at the top of the page) is only 30% complete, I have 1 contact in the system and now they’re trying to up-sell me to the so-called Premier service.

All I want to do is skip this screen but there is no way to skip it and for the life of me I can’t find the invitation on the site. My inbox (where I expect the message to reside) is empty, in fact there is nowhere that I can find where pending invitations might reside.

To make matters worse the home page merrily shows me how this person who I am trying to ‘konnect’ with is now connected to a long list of people. Now I just feel stupid. Surely I should be able to see the invitation.

After much head scratching I try the my network area. It shows I have one person in my network but strangely this person is listed under the wrong letter. Wait, no, the site is only showing her first name. Apparently, I was able to konnect to but didn’t realize I had!

While I don’t really like keeping multiple networks (I’ve been using linkedin for business and facebook for personal stuff for years and am also now a member of konnects and plaxo) I appreciate the fact that competition is a good thing and the people I know may prefer to use different networks, but for crying out loud, if you’re the new kid on the block at least offer me a decent user experience and don’t try to get me to buy more of the service before I’ve even had a chance to test drive it.

I certainly will not go adding my other connections to this site, nor will I be trying to get recommendations posted there. They’ve done nothing to win my loyalty, especially compared with the ease of use and great value I’m getting out of the networks I already belong to. Moral of this story, 1) make sure the experience you offer, especially if you’re the new kid on the block is at least as good as if not better than the other guy’s 2) don’t try to sell new users on additional services before they’ve had a chance to get their feet wet with the services they do have.