Archive for the 'Email' Category

Yet another example of the cost of bad email usability

Published
by
Anders
on May 22, 2008
in Email and Usability
. 4 Comments

Just got an email from Wimbledon Live containing the following

Dear Anders,

As a previous Wimbledon LIVE customer we are contacting you about your preferences. If you would like to be notified about the 2008 Wimbledon LIVE service, please take the following steps to update your preferences:

1) Go to www.wimbledon.org/LIVE.
2) Click “My Account/Login” on the left navigation bar.
3) Login with your email address and password.
4) Click “Change preferences”.
5) Check the box to sign up for the “MediaZone mailing list”.
6) Click “Save changes”.

We thank you for your continued interest in Wimbledon LIVE.

Sincerely,
MediaZone

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. I feel so sorry for the people who run the Wimbledon Live site, who are stuck with this horribly inept solution to something that should be very simple, such as

As a previous Wimbledon LIVE customer we are contacting you about your preferences. Please click on the link below if you would like to be notified about the 2008 Wimbledon LIVE service.

[here, there would be a link the user can click on which takes them to a web page where they can click on a button to confirm their preference - in other words, take the user directly to the last step above]

So what is the cost of those 5 extra unnecessary steps? Probably that a lot of people, such as myself, couldn’t be bothered to deal with them, which in turn means that less people will be notified about the 2008 service, which in turn means lost business.

This is just such a great example of designing without thinking holistically. In other words, just looking at the design of the individual web page or whatever as if it were its own little island, when the reality is that its part of a larger flow, a larger context.

On the brighter side, really looking forward to Wimbledon as always - though I don’t think he’ll do it, would be incredible if Federer pulled of six in a row.

Why do people who have my email address message me via FaceBook?

Published
by
Anders
on January 7, 2008
in Email and FaceBook
. 3 Comments

Call me a FaceBook curmudgeon, but I’ve never really been too crazy about it. It seems to be just another thing on the web to occupy your time. The only good thing, I’ve found, with FaceBook is that it has allowed me to connect with some *very* old friends, who discovered my page there (tho I think just googling my name may have been easier…) Someone I was talking to the other day also (to whom I was doing some venting) reminded me that FaceBook can be great for creating virtual communities, which certainly is the case. One reason FaceBook is great for that is because many of the people you’d want to have join your community already are signed up, so they don’t have to register for yet another web app. But that will only remain true as long as FaceBook is remains the in-vogue app.

But getting to my main point, I think my biggest pet peeve with FaceBook is when people who have my email address message me via FaceBook. Why oh why do you do this? It just seems like all it does is create an additional obstacle in the communication process, since I get the message that you messaged me in my email inbox anyway. Maybe I’m just not a sufficiently enlightened FaceBook user to understand why this roundabout way of communicating is a good thing. Is it just a way of saying “Hey, I use FaceBook, I’m cool” or is there some actual functional or feature benefit to doing this?

Google desktop 2 and streaming email

Published
by
Anders
on August 25, 2005
in Desktop Software and Email
. Closed

I’ve only had the new version 2 of Google Desktop installed for a few days and already it’s had a transformative effect, not in terms of desktop search (which I don’t use a lot), but in terms of the email aggregation feature. Since email is such a central aspect of everyday computing, it really is quite significant when a single tool suddenly shifts you away from the various tools you previous were clicking around in on your desktop to check webmail or Outlook mail or whatever. Now, it’s just like another feed that I’m checking in the Sidebar - it took me a day or so to get used to the concept. At first, I wanted to keep deleting new mails that appeared in the sidebar, and was actually a bit annoyed at Google for not only making it hard to remove email appearing in the side, but also realizing that you still needed to go into the email to delete it there as well. But I then realized that there really is no need to delete anything - it’s just a feed, and it allows you to not have to keep switching to your email client all the time. Instead, you get just enough information to make a determination if you want to actually go to the file. As an aggregator app, google desktop also shows me email from both outlook and gmail in a single stream, which I love - I don’t care where it came from, I just want to see a running list of my messages. One huge bonus is that I get to see all the messages from lists, which I have set in gmail to be filtered into their corresponding categories and not show up in the inbox, since that creates too much clutter, but seeing them in a stream is fine. Another thing I love about the sidebar is the scratch pad - I typed this blog entry into the scratch pad while waiting for a file to download.

Yahoo AddressGuard vs Gmail aliases - a case study in thinking outside the box

Published
by
Anders
on July 1, 2005
in Email and User Interface
. Closed

I remember when Yahoo AddressGuard came out. After having had two of my favorite email addresses pummeled to oblivion with spam, I jumped on the opportunity to a near endless store of disposable email addresses. I do remembering thinking that the process of creating new disposable addresses seemed a bit cumbersome, but what the hell, it was worth it! And then gmail was born, and with it came gmail aliases, and suddenly Yahoo AddressGuard seemed like a big old clunker…

Why? Well, the genius of gmail aliases is that you get almost all the benefit of Yahoo AddressGuard, but there is no ui, no forms to fill out, no disposable addresses to manage. All you do is add a plus sign to your current user id and then add some descriptive term to identify the alias. For example, if I’m filling out a form at BigBBQ.com, I might fill in my email address as gmailusername+bigbbq@gmail.com. Essentially, google replaced an entire user interface for managing disposable addresses with a plus sign! Ok, there is still a bit of a trade-off - your actual email can relatively easily be parsed out of the alias, but then gmail’s spam filtering is so good, that for the spammers who go to the trouble to do that (it won’t be worth it until gmail aliases become widespread), they’ll get dumped into the spam folder anyway.