UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging

Chapter 25. Captchas

ALLOWING PEOPLE TO take the next step with you through your web site, be that a newsletter sign up or a contact form submission, is exactly what you are aiming for at the end of the day. Creating barriers within that process can only hurt you. One of the biggest barriers are misguided Captcha forms. You may not have heard of the term but I am sure you have seen these forms. Captcha is that box that asks you to type in the "words" you see in a box to confirm that you are an actual human being. I understand the purpose of the Captcha, which is to stop spam robots.^[87]

And if you have ever been a victim of one of these spam bots hitting your site, the onslaught of spam submissions is practically unbearable. However, shifting the onus of proof to the potential subscriber or client can cause you to frustrate and possibly lose that person. I am not stubborn enough to think that people pound the keyboard and in fits of rage refuse to fill out the word "duck" that they see in a box. The problem with trying to verify if someone is human, as opposed to an automated program, is that they're too hard to read and end up frustrating your potential user/ customer. Recently I tried to sign up for a premium membership to a video-hosting site and was presented with this at checkout. See Figure 23.1.^[88]

Figure 23.1. Captcha Box

I actually have better than 20/20 vision. I have a somewhat ...