Interface Design Principle: Let people learn more

Of course, now the truly devious will simply include a “learn more” link in their email that does the same thing the “confirm” link does.

Well, unless it’s from someone you know, it looks like spam to me as it seems to be a mass mailing with a generic message
Personally i’d marke it as spam & block the application that sent it
- imma

Another interesting note about the devious nature of that email is that the sender isn’t even accurate. It lists “Slideshare” as the name, but it looks like it’s coupled with the email of the person who invited you. That person’s name is almost certainly not “Slideshare” nor is that email connected with Slideshare in any way.

That’s especially important in context, because a simple (though ideally unnecessary) step would be to just pluck the domain out the sender’s email and stick it into a browser to see what the site’s all about. Without that, and by sending an HTML email instead of plain text, it only leaves you with two options:

* Fire up your favorite search engine and plop in “Slideshare” since you don’t know if it’s .com, .net, .org, .biz, .tv, .fm, etc. It could even be a MySpace page for all you know. This is ends up getting a third-party involved (the search engine), probably with advertising revenue at stake. So not only are you as a user getting confused and mislead, but you’re may also be giving the site some cash for the experience.

* view the source of the email to get the domain out of the link. Many HTML email users don’t even realize they’re using HTML email, much less have a clue how to view the source, so this should never be an acceptable expectation.

I’d also offer a third option to your “Join Now” and “Learn More”: “View this person’s profile”. Sometimes, I don’t even know the person who’s inviting me to join a site, so I have no reason to trust where they’re sending me. With twitter, for instance, I can look at someone’s bio to see if they’re into web development, Python or Django to determine whether it’s a legitimate contact or just spam.

This is especially sad, because I’m a Slideshare member and it’s actually a pretty good service. I joined from word of mouth, where I got a good explanation of what it’s about, so I’ve never seen this email. Such a shame.

Also, I’d like to add that you need to know what information is important to learn about. I was curious to see some of these carbon footprint apps people have been talking about lately, so I signed up over at thecarbonaccount.com and a few others. Well, as I filled out my profile, I quickly realized that it’s designed solely for users in the UK. From where you live to what electrical provider you use, even what car models you have to choose from, all are based on the assumption that you live in the UK.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing on the site that indicates this before, or during, the sign up process. If it had been thecarbonaccount.co.uk, I could understand it, but it was a .com, which means it could be anywhere, and I expected it to cater to everyone. Boy, was I wrong. Now I have a partially-filled account at a site I can’t possibly use. They offer no option to delete the account (another fault I believe you’ve touched on before), and they haven’t responded to my repeated requests to remove my account and to add the appropriate information.

Also, before anyone tells me that the use of “tonnes” on the front should’ve been a clue, I’ve seen that spelling in a variety of things in the carbon footprint world, both within and outside the UK. Plus, even if that had been enough to indicate the origin of the site, that’s still not an indication that they *only* cater to users in that area.

I think the overall lesson here is that full disclosure is best all around.

So we’re not trying to be evil with that link. We’re just trying to reduce the number of clicks that a user has to perform in order to perform a given action (GOMS analysis 101). Thought experiment: is it devious if there’s an “unsubscribe” link that works with a single click?

It DOES look like we need to add a hyperlink to the group title, so that the group name (i.e. “Presentation Design Tennis”) takes you to the group and you can check it out. That’s a quick change, we can do that by next week.

The issue of the “from” setting in the email is a little bit more complicated (since email spoofing is NOT ok, and that’s what it would be if we sent an email on behalf of a user and made it look like it came from their email address provider, when in fact we sent it at their behest). I’ll look into this one.

I appreciate the post from a number of angles, including finding out that that was a real email. I got that same email, assumed it was spam, and sent it straight to my junk mail folder. I had a similar experience in that I was mildly intrigued by the idea of Presentation Design Tennis. But the nonsense sender name, simplyarun, seemed to confirm my spam suspicion. And these days, accepting an invitation in an email often results in getting sent straight to a form where one is supposed to register/fill out a profile/etc. without any real information or notion of what’s involved. With a real sender name though, I definitely would have clicked on a Learn More link because the idea sounded kind of fun.

@Jonathan: Thanks for stopping by. I’m sorry that I used the word evil. It’s not right on two levels: 1) it’s just an interface and 2) I know you and Rashmi and know you’re not evil. I just didn’t think before I posted.

Making the group name a link would be great. As far as the deviousness of the subscribe link…it wasn’t the link that I was frustrated with, it was the fact that it was the *only* link. Since I did want to learn more, and I wasn’t able to without committing to something that I didn’t want to commit to, I was frustrated. My motivation was halted.

So I think it’s great that the subscribe link works as a single click…and an unsubscribe would be great too. My concern was that the only choice was commitment.

Anyway, please accept my apology for calling the interface evil. I was talking about the interface, not you, but by extension it came off bad. It was silly of me. In hindsight, this post was really a bubbling over of many different interactions I’ve had with many services…frustration borne out of using Classmates, Facebook, and other services which are are long-time pains for me. I focused my frustration on Slideshare when I shouldn’t have directed it elsewhere.

People are the best source of knowledge

“Evil” is certainly a bit strong. Like error pages, emails like this typically land on the “now what have we forgotten?” list and get done abdly at the last minute.

My suggestion for Jonathan is add three things to the mail:

1. In the first line, replace “I’d like to” with “simplyarun would like to” with the name as a link.

2. As others have said, make the group name a link.

3. Leave the rest as is.

Two tiny changes, and that mail goes from fail to win! If only all interface problems were this easy to solve.

It is just very rude to place a link like that without informing the user or giving him an option to confirm or not to confirm. I call this ‘design for politeness’. (See link)

It reminds me the difference between a shopkeeper shouting ‘come and look’ and a scam artist offering a freebie and then making the taker look bad for not feeling obligated for having accepted.

With the ‘tell a friend’ idea that Amazon and others have, someone comes across a site or a product or feature on a site, and uses the ‘tell a friend’ utility on the site to tell-a-friend.
The friend clicks the link and they see what is on offer. They are not committed and their email presence should not be recorded.

That is the only proper way to proceed.