Yesterday I got a mail from UA (an old colleague, one of my few readers). As he knows it will interest me, he referred me to a mail he got from some company with an “unsubscribe” link (do I have to mention that he never subscribed to them?). When he clicked the unsubscribe link, he got the following page:
For the sake of my English readers and to save the time of the Hebrew readers – I will summarize this page:
We know you want to unsubscribe, but please note that each of your email address has also domain aliases – for example – if your email address is something@012.net, people can also send you mails to something@012.net.il. So if you want us to stop sending you to your address, please write down all your possible aliases, otherwise you will keep getting messages from us (yes, it is written in red !). And they add… “Together with the ISP abuse prevention departments, we compiled for you the full list of aliases per ISP… (the list on the right green bar)” – or in other words – we walked the extra mile for you in order to protect your privacy.
Seriously? you expect me to write all these email addresses? Why can’t you just write a simple script (I will code it for you, if you want) that takes the email address I entered and calculate all the aliases yourself ? It would make this page much simpler for everybody.
What a terrible user experience !!!
However, after a few hours it struck me – It is a brilliant user experience !
Before you start wondering what substance I inhaled before getting to this conclusion, I will explain:
(Disclaimer: the following is my interpretation. If they had other reasons to do it – I will be happy to hear…)
The page gives the users the option of unsubscribing from their service. This is the last thing they want you to do – so they make it difficult for you. This is not a new thing, but they are doing it in a very creative way.
- They are giving you the feeling that they care about you – so they formatted the page nicely (as opposed to other unsubscribe pages), and teach you about aliases and even collected all relevant aliases for you – so you will get the feeling they really care about you.
So they get your emotional vote. Maybe you will think twice about unsubscribing.
- They assume that once you start reading the page you will tell yourself “I do not have time for it right now, I’ll do it later” – which you will never do. Or maybe you will do it, but later…
So they earn time. meanwhile they can send you more messages.
- They warned you that if you will not write down all the addresses, you will continue getting mails – this is the most clever thing they do-
From their point of you – they have your consent to continue sending emails to all the addresses you did not enter.
My guess is that they do have a script, similar to the one I suggested earlier, but it does a different thing – it checks which of the aliases you failed to enter, and they update their database with the new address.
So it is not a matter of dumb UX, my feeling and personal interpretation is that they were just being creative here.
Do I like it as a user ? not at all. I even disgusted . But they got my vote for the creativity…
As the old saying goes “Kosher but stinks”
(sorry, I could not find any web resource with the story behind the idiom)
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