Multimap - how to ruin a really good website
If there’s three things that I hate, then Multimap has just scored a hat-trick:
- Pointless website revisions, for no good reason.
- Pop-up surveys asking what I think.
- Pop-unders (but I might just forgive that if that is really needed for commercial survival).
Well, I’m not going to waste my time being another statistic. Far easier to say it here, where it might just get one or two people reading it. So, I used to love Multimap - no surprise here, it was simple, easy to use, and I loved the ability to zoom in to the 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey maps.
Move on to June 2007, and what have they done? If the new version wasn’t fiddly enough, they then want to test my patience with a survey asking me what I think. Let me tell you - Multimap to me was an excellent supplement to Ordnance Survey printed maps, and saved me having a vast library of sheets I wouldn’t use very often.
All I wanted to do on this particular visit was check a village name for a caption I wanted to put on a photo. Sure, that won’t earn Multimap any money, but nor would most of my visits. I would assume their revenue model works by having enough visitors that they can earn revenue from banner adverts. Capturing data about their users can help boost revenue, but all they needed to do was ask me to log in, and they could have add all the info about me that they wanted. Instead, I’ll be off to find another website. I could just go back to the old version, but I’m sufficiently annoyed by the (constant) popping up of surveys and other junk that I think I’ll do some hunting around first.
In the meantime, I simply want to acquire some ordnance, and explode it in their survey maker’s office.
I really hope we never make the same mistake here at Flightmapping!
JA, Coventry
Ex Multimap user.
June 10th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Its even worse if your on a slow computer!
June 11th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Shoving surveys right into the middle of a user’s use of your site betrays your belief that a) users are some kind of crop to be harvested rather than human beings that will just go to your rival’s site if you piss them off, and b) surveys are in any way a useful tool.
I would think that Multimap will be all but dead in a few years time anyway, at least once the evil OS monopoly is broken and UK mapping data is easier to come by. The likes of Yahoo! and Google have armies of very clever people working for them and have economies of scale and access to data sources (over time) that Multimap can only dream of.