Terms of Services, Did You Ever Read Them?

Terms of Services, did you ever read them?

I read a great article called How To Fix The Nightmare Of Apple’s Terms Of Service. Yea… Terms of Services. I know it’s absolute necessary to be there, it’s important, it’s also what people refer to when we violate some of the rules. But honestly, I have never ever finished reading an entire Terms of Services before, instead, I checked the button “Yes, I have read…” right away.

People often blindly agree, but the terms are 100% enforceable.

I cannot agree more with this, but who has the time and patience to read them all? The article I mentioned above suggests a solution for reformatting the Apple iTunes Terms of Services like this:

Left is the current Licensing for iTunes, and right is the re-formatted one. Yes, nice and clean format. Like it. I agree this will bring people a better experience when they see the screen — “Oh well, finally get rid of the screen of overwhelming texts, yeah!”. But wait, are they going to read the nicely-organized terms of services page by page, without looking for the “Finish” button? Just think about it.

Let’s take a look two other mobile-version screens of Terms of Services I found.

Apple iTouch: Legal Statements

The other one:

Mobile App Getaround: User Privacy

I do like the idea that we could improve screens like above, and agree that more people will read the new iTunes Terms of Services. However, it’s not an “essential” part (can I say this?) of the actual application, so I think that’s why Apple constantly improves user experience of its product but always ignore Terms of Services. Maybe they want to improve it later, or they want more good ideas on it? Maybe.

Besides Terms of Services, there is another similar item that expects people attention but fails often — surveys. We send out surveys after services are complete, and want to collect data to improve services, but how many people would respond? 25% of them? Sometimes it’s hard to even reach this number. Therefore, we may use other strategies to push people to fill the form out, such as following up with them, and setting a prize for a random winner. One of my friend said “I don’t even look at the survey if there isn’t a prize in it”. We have ways to work with people to make them finish the surveys.

But for Terms of Services, any good idea to make people aware of them? Not wait till they are fined by violating the rules.

2 Comments Terms of Services, Did You Ever Read Them?

  1. michioryo

    I also want to give my opinions in this article. I do not have time today but I will visit later and will give comment.

    Reply

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