Yesterday I did something that made me feel like a total plonker. I was using a social networking site (I won’t say which one – though many of you will know by now) and as these sites do it has the feature to check your webmail address book for existing members and send invites to other people. I avoided the “Auto-invite” option and went to “Manually invite”. The next screen presented me with the title “Find your friends who are already on XXXXX” and a button labelled “Next”, and a list of addresses with a pre-ticked checkbox next to each (and no uncheck all option).
Oops. Pressing that Next button did not find which friends were already members. It sent invites to everyone.
I’m really sorry if I spammed you.
Usability lessons
- Don’t use “Next” as a label for the final step. To me, and I think to a sizeable number of others as well, “Next” implies that you’ll be going onto the next step of a multi-step process. The final step that actually does something meaningful should have a more meaningful label.
- Give every page or every step of a process a unique page heading.
- Limit the number of emails a single user can generate at one time.
- Provide tools to help users manipulate large sets of data (i.e. an uncheck all option).
User lessons
- Don’t assume that the people making the site have got the above right.
- If you’re even slightly confused as to what will happen, assume the worst rather than the best and act accordingly.
After this I had a look at my Gmail address book. It was full of rubbish. People I had emailed just once (all those unsubscribe@ or abuse@ addresses for example. Irony.); people who had left the companies and email addresses in question behind; lots of people I didn’t recognise at all; at least six of my own email addresses.
How many of you ever manage your Gmail address book? There’s a bunch of features in there for doing so, but one of the selling points of Gmail is that you never need to manage anything – there’s enough storage and enough processing power on the Google servers to keep everything, forever.
We’re trapped in a half-way world where the computing power allows us to never delete or manually manage anything but the interfaces and mashups only really work if you do.
annoyed