Don't send me a message to tell me I have a message

http://darrennix.com/dont-send-me-a-message-to-tell-me-i-have-a-me

by darrennix • 13 years ago

155 83 13 years ago

Rackspace support does this, drives me up a wall!

alekseyk• 13 years ago

If you are discussing something private that relates to your account/server/network, the rule of thumb is to avoiding sending anything over the e-mail for security reasons.

xoail• 13 years ago

Though annoying for the user, it's the best way to engage the user. Bring back to the website and boost up hits, opportunities to cross-sell, upgrades, or drive retention. Besides sending the message itself in the notification adds a bit of technical complexity.

jaryd2• 13 years ago

Pretty awesome that the company the OP is complaining about has already posted a comment in reply to the blog post (on the actual blog)...

-----------------------

Darren,

You're right, this sucks. Looking into this now and see how this can not happen again.

Michael La Rosa CMO at PSD2HTML.com

nemoniac• 13 years ago

Awesome? Really? Not in the slightest.

The CMO just sent him yet another useless, contentless message.

If he had any sincerity he would have first looked into it, then fixed it and only then replied to say that he had fixed it already.

rhizome• 13 years ago

"Lookin' to make a blog post on this bro. Keep checking the site, should be updated soon!"

bcgraham• 13 years ago

This is needlessly hostile. Being responsive is good. It's not contentless; he admits their current process sucks.

jaryd2• 13 years ago

Not in the slightest? So the CMO gets no credit for acknowledging the mistake?

I would be willing to bet that the CMO is not in any sort of position to make the necessary changes to ensure that this doesn't happen again, and so your suggestion is beyond his ability. By acknowledging the customer's frustration he lets the OP know that the company understands that this is an issue, and is now going to make an effort to correct it. In other words, "he has been heard".

Obviously, the comment alone is not enough, but it's a vital first step towards high quality customer support, and probably an instructive lesson for anybody in a service business.

dbalatero• 13 years ago

He also posted a longer explanation in the comments which to me seems pretty reasonable. Sounds like in this instance there's a switching cost they are trying to overcome. We've all been there. I think the article's point should definitely resonate for anyone building a new app, and/or anyone with an app that has a lower cost of updating.

error54• 13 years ago

There are some instances where this is necessary though. For example, my company has an internal messaging system and for HIPAA compliance we never send out the message contents or subject line. But I agree with xoail, most companies are just trying to get you back to website.

vampirechicken• 13 years ago

Dear customer, we have a Hippa/PCI/confidential-in-some-other-way message for you in our in-app message center. Please log in to view it. Yours, The Management.

There, that was easy. Otherwise, just send me the message.

jdechko• 13 years ago

Agreed. Insurance providers, banks and other people required to send secure messages probably already have you as a customer. They're not trying to drive traffic to their site for an extra ad impression.

tomjen32• 13 years ago

My bank does that with bills. Honestly it is one of the reasons why I hate my bank, but the worst part is I can't turn it off.

Just send it to me, my email is better protected than your site anyway.

stankx• 13 years ago

Ah, the "indignant post-it note on the fridge". Works every time.

gfosco• 13 years ago

Worse: Sending me an email after I unsubscribe because I don't want your emails, to let me know that I've unsubscribed.

mongol• 13 years ago

That's not so bad though

pc864• 13 years ago

Just because it's a pet peeve of yours doesn't mean it's bad design. It's standard practice and should happen all the time.

If a user likes me enough to forward my newsletter to 60 of their friends and one of them clicks unsubscribe because they don't take 10 seconds to read the subject, I'm out an extremely loyal reader/customer if I don't send that notification email.

maxk42• 13 years ago

No, it's still a bad design feature. Having just gone through this less than 60 seconds ago, it really feels like a slap in the face from a company I otherwise respect.

FireBeyond• 13 years ago

Let's rephrase, using two scenarios -

One:

"If a user likes me enough to forward my newsletter to 60 of their friends and one of them -who also happens to be subscribed to the same newsletter- clicks unsubscribe because they don't take 10 seconds to read the subject -and then scroll through the email and still fail to recognize that this is a newsletter they had also subscribed to-, I'm out an extremely loyal reader/customer -who can't even recognize my newsletter- if I don't send that notification email."

and Two:

add to the end, "when both problems could have been solved at once by requiring the user to confirm the email address they wanted unsubscribed when they clicked on the link, thus providing both verification, and ensuring that a friend does not mistakenly do the same."

tomjen32• 13 years ago

Pissing off your users is always a bad design.

In this case it is why I don't usually click unsubscribe, but either set up a filter or report it as spam.

rocky1138• 13 years ago

I got one of these today. I thought "well that's annoying" but then I thought "nah I guess it makes sense. I wanna know they know they aren't going to email me any more."

unionpivo• 13 years ago

I strongly disagree.

Every change to user account should send automated email stating what changed (and if email changed send it to both old and new address).

This is so you know that changes took effect, and in case somebody else tried changing info for you.

This includes cancellation/termination of service.

Think of it as a commercial transaction, you request an action, and after action is completed you receive receipt.

DanBlake• 13 years ago

Most companies doing this are not naive in their design. They want you to come back to the website so you can read it and hopefully be lured into doing something else on site while you are there. I agree for the PSD2HTML example it is silly though.

Most social networks and dating sites are the biggest offenders as they want you to continue browsing or in some cases, upgrade to pro to read the message.

It may not be 'desirable' ui/ux in the endusers view, but when its done like that I suspect the provider has found out "this makes me more money both now and in the long run"

I think we could just as easily see a post on HN tomorrow saying "One simple tip to increase your email click rates 2500%"

bpatrianakos• 13 years ago

You hit the nail on the head. It's getting very annoying to read posts by people who get up on their high horse and proclaim "this is terrible design and I'm shaming companies who do this"... except that's not the case. It's just a mildly annoying thing for them but as far as the sites are concerned this is great design. Rather than go around saying "I proclaim this wrong" we should start saying "I don't like this" because in the end that's really what most people are saying and they come off like dicks when it turns out there's a pretty good reason for the "wrong" thing to be such.

pifflesnort8• 13 years ago

It's good design to provide a worse experience to your customers?

This is why I've always enjoyed Apple products. They don't perform these kind of ridiculous mental gymnastics to justify doing a worse job for their customers.

devcpp• 13 years ago

Dark patterns suck. I'll shame companies that do this, regardless of how efficient it is. We should be focusing on selling products, not manipulating clients into buying them.

A business that needs this kind of practices is a sloppy one that will collapse before it gets big. It's a waste of time and money on both sides.

jimktrains22• 13 years ago

In all honesty, though, email is not exactly a secure way to send a message.

Now, I'm not disagreeing with you, but there are times when it makes sense.

fjh• 13 years ago

If someone has access to your email, it is almost certainly trivial for them to access your account for the service holding the message.

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

All of what you've said boils down to one thing: sites and companies doing this put their interests and concerns ahead of yours, utility, and functionality.

Which is another reason I make very little use of such services.

cookiecaper3• 13 years ago

Is it not in the interest of a service's users for that service to operate at a healthy clip of profitability? Email alerts like this can make a very big difference in clickthrough rates, implying both that users find them useful and that the company would take a significant viewership loss if they stopped the practice.

timr3• 13 years ago

This is correct. I've observed dramatic differences in click-through rates when including even a tiny bit of message text in the email notification you send to users. There's not one right answer.

What (some) users want isn't always the same as what's good for your business, so you have to be judicious.

pifflesnort8• 13 years ago

I can't help but wonder what the long-term business effects are of intentionally damaging your relationships with your customers by wasting their time and choosing to prioritize arbitrary business priorities (eg, e-mail click-through rates) over actual user satisfaction.

mqatrombone• 13 years ago

Sometimes that's the best way to do it. HIPAA requirements are a pain, but they exist for a reason.

pc864• 13 years ago

Agreed, I automatically exempt anything dealing with healthcare or finances from stuff like this. I definitely don't want my bank emailing me customer service messages which could contain who knows what kind of sensitive information.

agrona• 13 years ago

I think I've only ever seen this from banks or medical organizations, where the annoyance is a little more acceptable.

I'd much rather they send me an (encrypted) e-mail, but I understand why they can't.

bruth• 13 years ago

Ha, I thought I was the only one to get annoyed by redundant messages: http://devel.io/2011/05/08/electronic-communication-etiquett...

animal• 13 years ago

My favorite is nelnet.com (manages my student loans) who emails me to tell me I have a message, after which point I log in to the website, visit the message center, and click on the message which starts my browser downloading a PDF usually containing several pages of terms and branding bullshit and a sentence or two of actual text which most of the time is nothing I needed to know anyway. And of course the link text of the message that I click on is something useless like "Message regarding your account".

danielweber• 13 years ago

This is often a security feature.

If my bank has an important message for me, telling me to log in to my account to look at it is a good idea.

prg318• 13 years ago

I would honestly be applaud if my bank or hosting provider sent any sensitive information via e-mail.

"Switch to email. Trusted since 1971."

Sure - Email may be 'trusted' but that doesn't make unencrypted plain-text messaging over the Internet secure.

elliottcarlson• 13 years ago

The sad part is that the majority of messages (at least in the case of Chase bank) are duplicates of what are in the email, or at least able to be figured out from the email (e.g. a large deposit has been made). I'd be concerned that with the frequency of emails received, it might prevent people from logging in when there actually is a real important message.

theorique• 13 years ago

Agreed, I would prefer that my account information be accessible at a secure web site rather than being sent out in cleartext email.

marcosdumay• 13 years ago

If my bank sent me an email with a link, I'd be yelling to my account manager in a few minutes.

alok-g• 13 years ago

Telling me (or my wife) to log into my account for sensitive information may be a good idea, but including a link in the email for the purpose does not seem to be. It opens possibilities of phishing attacks.

stormbrew• 13 years ago

It's especially irritating on sites that delete old messages after a certain amount of time. I'd rather opt-in to an archival strategy than have one forced on me by a site.

igorgue• 13 years ago

Bank simple does this, it is a security measure, imagine a random person just opens your email in your phone (most likely note secured) and reads a message that reveals things like account balance.

noinput• 13 years ago

I'd like to think that if a random person got ahold of my phone and was in my email, the balance of my account is the last thing I'd worry about.

ketralnis• 13 years ago

Perhaps, but I'd like to worry about N-1 things

gaetan• 13 years ago

I like how easy it is to follow, comment and close the tasks on Asana: - They send an email with the full comment/update made on the task - Reply to the email to send a comment and it will update Asana - There is a direct link in the email to “View and edit” the task or to unfollow it. - You can reply with “complete” to mark the task completed - You can assign the task to a teammate by adding him to the email “to” field. All this without leaving Gmail.

OGinparadise• 13 years ago

Sending me an email to tell me that I have a message with a link to actually read the message is unforgivably bad design.

I don't want to:

Why not? It's "unforgivably bad design" only if enough people don't click, browse and sign up for services. Who cares if they annoy me or you? It's a numbers game, thy don't need to please everyone. As the bad pitch goes"...if we only get 0.1% of users to..."

_sh• 13 years ago

It's "unforgivably bad design" only if enough people don't click...

I understand your sarcasm, but 'good design' is an aesthetic, not a metric.

[edit: on second thoughts, I think I may have over-simplified things. Is 'good design' purely quantifiable?]

hjay• 13 years ago

oDesk does something similar, but something I like about their approach, is that they include the message in the email.

There is a "Click to reply" button, but you can just reply to the email and it will reply to the message. Only benefit I noticed to actually using the oDesk interface to reply, is that any blank lines in your email response is omitted, while doing it in the oDesk interface keeps your formatting.

lwhalen• 13 years ago

I wish there was some mechanism to allow a recipient to upload a PGP public key, that way future messages could be sent securely directly to the account-holder in question. Added bonus - it would bring more widespread adoption to PGP and related PKI/web-of-trust email systems.

tomkarlo• 13 years ago

The problem here is that the most reliable delivery channel (email) is not sufficiently secure enough for a lot of situations. Worse, some users share email accounts, so you can't even depend on the auth of the account. If an app or service has to achieve a certain level of security, it can't rely on email as a direct message channel - it can only really use it for notifications that a message is available.

Contrast that with Android apps, where the app can show a notification at the system level but then handle (or retain) the service-specific login (and/or respect its rules about timing out the login.)

siculars• 13 years ago

The only place sending an email to notify someone of a message is a Good Thing(TM) is in highly sensitive or security conscious environments like medicine, law, finance and the like. Where the sender must be certain that the message is received in a secure manner, ie. over https.

jonjohn84• 13 years ago

favorite comment:

There has been a new comment posted, click the following to view the comment: http://www.example.com/?comment=324243&rerfer=http%3A%2F....

georgemcbay• 13 years ago

The worst are companies with both sites and apps and they send me both an email notification and an in-app notification for every fucking thing. And so now I've got multiple notifications going off on my phone for exactly the same actual event just in different formats (one notification letting me know I got an email about a change on the site, one notification from the app reporting the same thing as the email is). And then throw a digest email on top every day or so and the notifications quickly start spiraling out of control. I'm looking at you Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Granted, I can usually disable one or the other or both but it is a pain that I have to and I wouldn't even mind the notifications if I didn't feel like I was being assailed by them at times.

Apreche• 13 years ago

Don't ask me "Can I ask you a question?"

tibbon• 13 years ago

You have a new compliment on Yelp

Someone on Yelp has sent you a compliment!

See your new compliment

See you on Yelp,

— The Yelp Team

Wingman4l7• 13 years ago

I initially felt this way about forum posts, but after reading Joel Spolsky's take on it in Building Communities with Software,[1] I changed my mind. Basically the reasoning was: do this and you'll never get your forum to critical mass -- new users will just read replies to their questions in their inbox and never come back to the forum and contribute.

He never says it's not okay to enable this functionality after you have a solid userbase, though. =)

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi...

Splendor• 13 years ago

Also, don't send me an email to confirm that you won't send me any more emails.

Imagenuity• 13 years ago

The corollary to this is "Don't leave me a message to call you back, instead leave me a message why you called." That way I can call you with the answer, or handle it via a better means (email, text, tweet, etc.), or delegate if appropriate. It wastes both of our time leaving a message to call you back. This is in my voicemail greeting. Seems to work.

jjellyy• 13 years ago

I get these from airbnb. SO ANNOYING since there mobile site doesnt work on my windows phone and they have no native app.

Don't send me a message to tell me I have a message

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