femminista: thoughts of a feminist rhetorician

The first and most important rule of usability (in my opinion) is quite simple--don't piss off your customers. Seriously. Unless what you're selling can't be found anywhere else, it doesn't matter how fantastic it is if you piss your customer off before they get a chance to see how awesome your product is. My current complaint is with email newsletters. They fill up my inbox and draw my attention away from important messages. Also, much of the time I'm not even sure how I got on their list in the first place. Now don't get me wrong; email newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your customers--as long as you make them short, succinct, and infrequent. One to two emails a month at the most. When you get emails from the same companies/organizations on a daily or weekly basis, they become part of the spam fodder littering your mailbox. They become part of the landscape of email annoyance and you cease to pay any attention to their content. However, you do end up remembering the name of the company pestering you with their relentless email and you grow to hate them. Moving on to the second half of the email newsletter rule. Always make it easy for your customers to unsubscribe. This means that there should be a clearly visible link in each email newsletter and this link should immediately unsubscribe the customer. Here are some easy guidelines

• Do not ask the user for an email address and/or password so that they can change their "settings." You've annoyed then enough with your emails. Don't make them jump through additional hoops to unsubscribe.
• Do not under any circumstances include a button that says "I've changed my mind. Please keep sending me your emails." This is stupid and annoying, especially when that button is preceded by a form that the user has filled out.
• Do not ask a user to reply to your email with unsubscribe as the email message and/or header unless you are absolutely certain that it will work.
• Once they have unsubscribed, don't keep sending them emails. What, are you slow? They don't want to get your emails!

And, if you're not convinced by me, check out the report from Nielson-Norman Group. [The report itself is incredibly expensive, but you can get a pretty good sense of the content by reading the free executive summary.] My suggestions here are based on what I've learned during their Usability Week classes and my own observations as a user. Take them; leave them; use them as kindling for your fire. I'm pleased that I was able to vent my frustration with email newsletter practices.