Why city.ask.com Instead of askcity.com?

With the launch of Ask City from Ask.com, we can all learn a valuable lesson: make your product and domain match. For example, Ask.com has chosen to locate their new local search tool at http://city.ask.com while they are still calling it Ask City. This creates a mess because people, if they don’t search for it, are use to finding a site by taking the brand name and sticking it in between a “www.” and a “.com”. Anything beyond that creates inefficiencies. In a recent lecture from Paul Allen he mentioned that Ask.com was asking for trouble by doing this and I now have proof that it was a bad move. Check out this line from a CNet article I just read about askx.com:

“The test [of askx.com] comes on the heels of Ask’s unveiling of a new local search site, AskCity.com, which features maps and city business listings.”

Unfortunately, if you go to askcity.com (as mentioned in the article) you will get nothing. Your query may be transferred to your default search engine which would then likely give you city.ask.com. However, these steps are all unnecessary and I’m sure that they are losing people that are mildly interested but not intent on working hard to find what they want. How are you going to turn a mildly interested individual into a repeat visitor if they cant find you easily? Well… you wont.

Reasonable Person Standard

I just finished a Business Law class and I learned something there that would apply well to branding and domain selection. It’s called the Reasonable Person Standard. The basic idea behind this standard is to evaluate what can be expected from an individual by comparing them to the intelligence and capabilities of an average person. Ask.com could have applied this standard when they were trying to answer the question “what domain should we use for something that we are going to call Ask City?” Well, a reasonable person would likely expect it to be at askcity.com. The domain city.ask.com would fail the Reasonable Person Standard.

More Examples

As another example, I recently talked to someone else that wanted to use “pointe” in their brand as apposed to the usual spelling of ”point” (without an “e”). Would an average parson know to put an “e” on the end? No. This domain would also fail the test.

As yet another example, I work with a company that has a .us TLD. They are always having to explain that it’s a .us and not a .com. You can get around this by incorporating the TLD into your brand. Authorize.net does a good job on this. For this company, though, which is a brick-and-mortar business and an not an Internet-based business, it has proved to be confusing.

Summary

Even though these might seem like small branding issues, they will likely get bigger with time. It would be easy to explain that there is an “e” on the end to only a few customers, but what about when you have hundreds? What about when people just mention your name to someone else and they forget to tell them “now be sure to remember to put an “e” at the end of that.” I will be a problem. Trust me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 and is filed under Whatever, Design and Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.