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July 2, 2008

Newsletter Usability

I recently went to a usability conference and attended a workshop about e-newsletter usability. This was my second time in this workshop (the first was almost six years ago) and it was interesting to see what had changed and what stayed the same. For example, the latest research report now contains a section about RSS. I thought I’d share a few ideas from the workshop with you over the next few weeks and also let you know how we handle some of these issues with the NSLS weekly e-newsletter and website.

Let’s get started with some general findings in a bulleted list (because bulleted lists are good for web writing).

• Users look to the left navigation and bottom of the page for links to subscribe to e-news.
• Users feel a great deal of frustration when required to register for a site just to get the e-newsletter.
• When this study was first done 7 years ago, users defined spam as blatant messages that they did not want. Now it is defined as anything they don’t want, which includes newsletters. If they don’t want it, to them it’s spam.

So far we’re OK. Our e-news subscription area on the NSLS site is on the left side and users are not required to sign into the site to subscribe. I thought it was interesting that sometimes people subscribe to a newsletter, forget, and then consider it spam. I’ll share more general findings with you next time.

posted by Christina at 11:30 am |

1 Comment »

1. Pingback by Behind the Scenes @ NSLS » More on e-Newsletter Usability, July 16, 2008 @ 3:14 pm

   
   

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