PIA website has two critical UX problems
- Where is the MEMBER LOGIN button?
- Where is the DOWNLOAD button?
I'm an existing customer, I go to the PIA homepage. What do I see?
- GET STARTED NOW
- JOIN NOW
- 7 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
- HOW IT WORKS?
- CONTACT US?
- ENGLISH?
Only a SINGLE link directs existing customers to the client portal, "MEMBERS". Clicking this brings you to the login page. If you login (you're a member! go ahead and login), the download links for the PIA client DISAPPEAR. Where did they go?
Why, they're back at the member login page! You doof, why did you log in as a member if you wanted to download the PIA member client?
I can't be the only person that sees these two very minor things as huge flaws in the user experience.
Solutions:
- If you look on almost ANY WEBSITE EVER, they couple and pair the LOGIN and JOIN buttons side-by-side. There needs to be an orange LOGIN button next to the Join Now button.
- There needs to be a "DOWNLOAD CLIENT" button somewhere. As far as I know, the only way to reach the client downloads is to click the MEMBERS category in the header. Does that make intuitive sense to customers? No. At a minimum, I think there should be a static download client link at the top of every page in the top header bar, next to the Language select. It's the basic way customers interact with your services. It should be front and center everywhere they look, in my opinion. Most websites do client downloaders this way -- see Steam http://store.steampowered.com/
A beautiful site otherwise! Which is exactly why I went with PIA -- the usability, the clarity, the professional and very corporate image of your homepage. It looks fantastic, but there are 2 very unnecessary trip-ups once you're a member.
Regards
Comments
Another annoyance is the necessity to go to Google Play Store to get the Android client. I don't trust Google and refuse to go there (got it from APK Mirror in the end).
Thanks very much for the feedback! I agree that there are certainly some issues around here which we can resolve.
I'll make sure that our web team takes a look at the download links on our site, thanks very much for the feedback.
PiaVipper, we've recently started adding the APK to our downloads page here: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/client-support/
In the lower-right, you'll see the "Download APK" link, which hopefully lets you update the PIA app without an issue.