Please don't leave me!

In a previous article, Unsubscribe me from this hell, I commented on how difficult it often was to find out how to stop receiving email from some companies along with providing an example of an easy to discover and use unsubscribe option. In this sequel I look at Verisign, one of the largest providers of SSL certificates used to secure website traffic etc.

I am fed up receiving useless emails from Verisign. They contain no information and often use scare tactics (falsely, I might add) in order to get you to choose their product over a competitor. I am, however, lazy and it's taken me years to bother to look for an unsubscribe link. I found it in the expected place – tiny text at the bottom of the email buried amongst plenty of irrelevant lines of words.

I rather expected to be able to click the link and be taken to a web page confirming that I had been unsubscribed, after all, they're a large multi-national company not short on technical ability. Sadly this was not to be the case. Instead I was assaulted with the offending page (shown below) which requested an incredible amount of information from me just so I could unsubscribe!

I have absolutely no idea why they decided this was a good way to do it, but it isn't. Why do they need to know my name, job function, company, address etc. in order to stop sending me email? The only saving grace, for those of you paying attention, is the little asterisk beside only the fields for email address and “Send Email Updates” denoting those are the only two fields required to be completed.

An unsubscribe link should ideally contain the information required to tell the business who I am and that I wish to unsubscribe, resulting in no further action than taking me to a web page asking me to confirm I wish to unsubscribe (it is possible to click a link by accident, I think the confirmation step is acceptable). At worst, I should be asked for my email address and confirmation I wish to unsubscribe.

Once I completed the above form (email address and no more email request ONLY!) I was presented with the following confirmation screen. The first point to note is that it claims “Subscribe Thank You”. Uhm. No. I just unsubscribed. I'm going to assume it's done what I asked, but not provided the correct information on the confirmation screen … and monitor my email.  Secondly my request will be “processed within 48 hours”. Uhm. Why? This is an email list removal request. It is not only a standard function of a mailing list, it is incredibly simple to automate and I should be removed in about the time it takes the confirmation page to load.

At every step of my attempt to remove myself from Verisign's email list, I have been left with the impression that one of the three cases apply:

• they are outright incompetent: so why would I use them for security?
• they don't care about user experience at all: so why would I use them at all?
• They are too lazy to design a simple system well: so why would I trust them to support me?

Usability really does matter folks. It's not something that can be done as an after thought, it needs to be part of the process from the first thought, otherwise you end up pissing off people who might otherwise give you their money.