They won’t let me leave

well that’s not entirely true…

They are making it impressively inconvenient for me leave

Brilliant strategy of you’ve got someone by the credit card, but it’s a horrible move. Try to follow my logic on this one, and feel free to comment on whether I’m an invalid or not.

When I signed up, I wasn’t pressured

They showed me around, answered all my questions, and then told me I could come back anytime if I was interested in signing up. I ended up signing up that day, as I liked what I saw and liked the staff. It far surpassed any of the other gyms I had looked at, and I was happy to join with them.

I signed some papers, wrote off my soul, etc. etc.. Everything was par for the course.

I used the facilities, and I liked them

Things were clean and maintained. The patrons were nice, followed the rules, and generally got along. I never had a complaint, though I did overhear one of a lady being upset that another lady was wearing a belly top of sorts (this was against the dress code.)

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that they had a respectable dress code. No scantily clad women or men. This was a place for working out, not gawking.

I got lazy, and stopped going

Yup, all me. I got lazy, fell out of practice, and eventually stopped going. I was still paying for the gym though, despite my never going. That’s no ones fault but my own. I was under a contract with them and I had to wait a while before I could quit.

I finally got around to quitting, or so I thought

I walked into the gym that faithful day, and told them that I wanted to cancel my membership. “No problem,” said the helpful desk girl, “Just mail this paper with your email on it to the head office. They will then send you an email confirmation and you can cancel.”

Wait, what? Mail? You mean that thing with the paper and the stamps and the envelopes? That thing you do with Santa? Seriously?

Seriously.

Well, that’s ridiculous. I’m sure I can just go online or something to do this. They had a way to sign up for an account, so there should be a way to cancel it in the same area right?

Wrong.

This is where things went down hill for me. I created an account (which required a phone call as some of my internal data was missing, causing the validation to fail), and looked around for a ‘Stop Payment’ or ‘Cancel Account’ or something. There was no link to be clicked, no button to be pressed, no email to be sent. The only way to cancel your account was to mail in a paper, which you could print from the website, to their home office on California.

What’s wrong with this picture?

They did such a good job of nabbing me, of keeping me happy and content, of making sure my opinion of them was that of ‘sunshine from the butt’ proportions. Why would they drop me on my ass when I want to leave? Now all the good things they did for me are forgotten, and all I can say is what a bitch it is to cancel my membership.

Lesson: don’t burn bridges

They have, whether intentionally or not, burned a bridge with me. Not only do I want to cancel my account with them (I’m working on it, I promise) but now I want to tell everyone about how much of an ordeal it is to cancel said account. I’m not going to say how wonderful their places are, or how considerate their staff may be; I’m going to remember the freshest experience first: dropped on my ass.

If you’re going to try and screw people out of money, fine. I can’t stop you, because that’s just how a lot of businesses operate and I’m not one to comment on that. I’ll leave the business commentary to those who know what they’re talking about. What I’m trying to get across is a simple usability exercise: If you make everything from start to finish as simple and easy as possible, that’s what I will tell people.

Had the gym made it simple to cancel my account, they may have lost out on my 40 dollars a month. They would have also gained a person who would spout out their greatness to anyone willing to listen. I liked that gym, but I will no longer recommend them for this reason.

To summarize: Be nice from start to finish. Even when people are leaving you, wave them goodbye, don’t slam the door on their ass on the way out. Those people have mouths.

Bonus Lesson: Have a point of contact

If you visit their website, you’ll find that the only way to contact them is via a non-800 phone number, within set hours. No email, no contact form. What’s the point of a website with online user registration, when you can’t even email the company?

What happened?

First of all, they went through a drastic re-design which I am, for the most part, a fan of. The problem with this is that they changed it all so much I was utterly lost as to where to go. A better Idea could have been to have a transitional layout to let people get used to things before making a final switch. Not a requirement, and it’s possible that they did indeed do this. Like I said, it had been a while since the last time I went.

The second part was that I couldn’t figure out how to access my zone. All that hard work of mine, and I couldn’t access it. I still can’t figure out how the heck to get to it from the 9rules site. The amount of user info that’s left on 9rules is my username, email, and password; none of which can be changed from the 9rules website.

As it turns out, the entire “community” portion of 9rules has been completely removed. If you want to change your information, whore your wares, or do anything the old 9rules did, you now have to go to Chawlk.com. That is, in essence, where most of 9rules went. It’s still in a transitional stage, so the site isn’t totally finished, but it has everything the older 9rules had, with an updated look.

All of the user-submitted content, voting, friending, point-usage, and anything else that they used to offer has been moved off site, leaving only approved posters rolling up to 9rules.

So where’s the rule-breaking?

I had no idea any of this had happened. Granted, I’m not a regular member, so I had no idea this was coming. That shouldn’t of happened though. At the very least some sort of press release, newsletter, or cursory email should have been sent out telling everyone that they were going through a complete site reformation. I, as a member – and on some level a customer/consumer – should have been notified that these changes were occurring.

On a side-note, they also break a couple design rules by forcing me to go to another website to change my information. This wouldn’t be so bad (OpenID floats to mind) except for the fact that there is absolutely no mention of this other site, and I had to go digging around to get the link. My old bookmark to my profile actually redirects me to the new site, which in and of itself is a jarring experience. Redirecting people without telling them is a no-no!

So what do I think about it all?

So what do I have to say about the new 9rules, even after all my pseudo-bitching? I like it. I like that 9rules now features premium content, complete with posted site submission dates and a review process. Sure that screws me from posting my little posts on their site (Chawlk still allows it though, so all is not lost) but I’m glad that I can’t. At least now I know that 9rules will feed me with information from reliable sources. I’ve already found a couple of contributors that I want to add to my ever-growing RSS store on Google Reader.

Chawlk on the other hand needs a little work. I’m aware that It’s in a transition stage, so anything I say now may not apply in a month. First off, I love the “Chawlk is…” at the top of the page, though the refresh button really isn’t needed for that. The User page is the same as it was on the old 9rules, which makes me a little sad. Sure it’s neat that they have a Twitter, Last.fm, website RSS, and Flickr feed hookup, but it makes for a rather convoluted looking page.

Have a look at mine: It’s just too busy. Everything is so big, that once you start pumping in content it gets bulky and too much for me to bother looking through. A possible option for them could be to separate the last.fm and website rss combination. put the last.fm on the left beneath the Twitter box, and possibly move the Flickr over to the side as well. I don’t know what the Flickr section looks like because I haven’t really used Flickr, not have I tied Chawlk to my Flickr account. The end result is an empty section that never finishes loading.

I’d also suggest making things a little smaller. You don’t need each RSS entry to be an inch tall. That’s just a waste of space, and actually helps detract from clarity. It’d be nice if they allowed you the ability to hook into other social networks such as FriendFeed and Pownce.

Ending thoughts

The new 9rules is a great improvement, as far as I’m concerned. Stripped out all of the crap and just left the lean, delicious high-quality content. Accessing your user info is a bitch, and a friendly link in the user window would be a great asset.

The newly-formed Chawlk needs some work. As it is everything that 9rules discarded, I can’t help but feel that that’s exactly what it is: discarded. It feels lower on the quality scale, and I hope it doesn’t continue that way, otherwise the whole thing will probably go belly-up. I’m reserving saying to much about it as it’s still being worked on at this point. It needs work, I’ll leave it at that