It’s Saturday.  You’re at work.  You get spam from a site you haven’t read in 2 years. You’re in a hurry – you’re busy and you want out of the office, but you’re tired of these notifications.

You click Unsubscribe and land here, the Apartment Ratings website. Quick! Figure it out!  How do you unsubscribe?

How quickly did you find it? Did you ever find it? I spent a good deal of time looking for a link to click on, something about “notification preferences” or “marketing” or “unsubscribe”.

It’s the yellow envelope.  Click the yellow envelope and you’ll get this:

What’s wrong and what can we improve?

• The biggest problem is upstream: I should have one-click Unsubscribe access from the spam itself.  Too often you’re forced back to the site (login, go to preferences, search for preferences) – totally unnecessary.  Putting hurdles in front of marketing messages doesn’t get more people to read your babble, it gets them upset.
• The envelope doesn’t appear to be clickable. It looks like an icon label for the “Notify me of new content” setting.
• The rest of the page uses links for everything. Why isn’t “Notify me of new content” a link? Or at least a parenthectically-mentioned “(change)”? There are links below the horizontal rule for Create, Edit, and Delete. And I can even guess from the parenthetical “(0)” that I can click that and manage my favourites.
• When I move my mouse over the envelope, it doesn’t turn into a hand; it stays a pointer. While I doubt the majority of web users will notice this subtle difference, it’s extraordinarily low-cost to implement (cursor:xxx in CSS) and communicates clickability.
• Programmer-speak “Notify me of new content.” How about “Notify me when someone comments on my review” or “Notify me when my reviews get comments” or “Notify me when one of my favourites gets a new review” ?
• Design in general – Why is there a horizontal rule? What appreciable difference is there among all of the data presented on this page? It’s all stuff to do with me, and there’s very little of it. Why are the fonts so small? 11px is as low as you can go, but why not 12? There’s just not much on this page so why a little font?

Off to Planet Granite!