GoDaddy: good luck with your transfer

GoDaddy’s cluttered interface has generated numerous complaints over the years. The checkout process is a minefield of upsell options. One moment of distraction can leave you buying undesired services.

When trying to transfer a domain name from GoDaddy to another registrant (because you really can’t bear it any longer), the domain management page throws up a set of instructions:

(as of November 2015)

Pretty accurate, and following the steps will probably grant a linear, successful transfer. Point 3, though, is not clear on the cancellation process: on the domain management page there’s no straightforward way of cancelling the protected registration. The easiest way is to search under the help section of the site, no surprise if people miss that. The initial four steps can also be missed, when the transfer process is initiated from the website of the new registrar. When that happens, the transfer is simply refused with no explanations and no instructions on the steps to take. The result is a time-consuming and tedious series of phone calls to customer support. This is silly business logic: a customer requesting a transfer clearly expresses their intention, why aren’t they taking it into consideration, as they were supposed to? It wouldn’t be a big deal to send out emails to explain any wrongdoing and what other solutions are available.

By not providing accurate information, the company puts their customers on track to miss the transfer altogether and forget about it.

To add more confusion, the ‘Transfers’ section on the domain management page shows no pending transfers, even after they have been initiated. It’s also ugly, badly designed, and out of alignment.

The dialogue to cancel auto-renew has some issues, too:

First you set auto-renew to disabled, then click ‘Save’.

An error message pops up. The abstruse language requires some cognitive effort to get through. It must be surprisingly difficult for designers at GoDaddy to handle such tricky scenarios! That aside, it looks like a confirmation, rather than an error message. You then either go instinctively for the prominent ‘OK’ button, or indulge on the ‘View errors’ link, and that is one step too many that could be avoided:

Imagine going through this series of dialogues without reading everything, as most people are likely to do. It may look as if auto-renew has been disabled, while in reality it has not. Do they do it on purpose? It’s hard to say; certainly it’s not what you’d call a user-friendly interface.