05 February 2010

The Problem: I recently received an email from The TypePad Team asking me to fill out a survey. Here is what it said exactly:

Hello,

Yesterday you should have a received an email from me telling you about an upcoming survey for TypePad. This is your official invitation to participate in this survey.

We want to make TypePad better by understanding more about you, what you blog about, and your experience with TypePad. The survey should take about 5 minutes to complete and your answers will be treated with the utmost confidence.

I realize your time is valuable and your participation and feedback is extremely important to helping us improve TypePad. If you could complete the survey by Wednesday, February 10th, we would greatly appreciate it.

To take the survey, please click here: (I won't put you through the pain)

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly at: (not necessary)

Sincerely,

The TypePad Team

Lack of Excellence: My problem with this was two-fold.

First, the survey itself is NOT a five minute survey. I thought I'd be nice, so I decided to fill it out (even though I'm not really using TypePad any more). But 8-10 minutes in I was so frustrated that I dropped out and never finished the survey. I suppose if you checked boxes wildly you could be done in 5 minutes, but I was trying to check the correct boxes and give explanations that would add value.

Second, (and maybe this was at the end) there was no real assessment of the negatives. Questions were more along the lines of, "How would you rate this totally excellent and awesome feature in TypePad?" instead of, "Do you feel TypePad does a good job by offering this feature?" or "Do you feel TypePad offers the right features?"

I've never been a big fan of TypePad in general and I'm in the process of moving at least three long time staff bloggers from TypePad to WordPress. But that doesn't mean I wish TypePad ill will. I simply don't understand the philosophy they operate under and hope that they course correct quickly for the sake of those that are still using their platform. I think they truly believe they have one of the best platforms out there - when from everything I've experienced, they charge a lot of money for something that is behind the times, poorly themed, and locked down so tight you'd have to move a mountain to try and customize it. All making me ask, What were they thinking?