Thursday, September 27, 2007

Stupid Notification E-Mails

Web-based services are great for various things. For example, I'm a user of the Game Trading Zone for trading old games, a user of YouTube for publishing short video clips and just today I've signed up on StudiVZ, a social networking site for students.

Of course, I'm not going to sign in to every service every day just to check if there are new messages or something that needs my attention. That's what e-mail notifications are here for. The best and most useful e-mail notifications I get are the ones from the Game Trading Zone: Another user sends you an offer and in the e-mail you get a complete description of the offer (what's offered + details of items, custom message, shipping and other settings) and a link to go directly to the offer site. A dream! As soon as I open the e-mail, I know all about the offer and can decide what to do.

Not so with the two bad examples which upset me so much today that I started writing what you read here. I've often got notifications from YouTube, which sends out a notification e-mail whenever someone posts a comment to a video I've uploaded. BUT the actual comment isn't in the e-mail, for that I have to open the YouTube website. How stupid is that? If they just sent the comment in the mail, I could quickly read it and decide if I have to reply, delete the (spam) comment or just read it and forget about it. Instead I have to open that YouTube page. The same stupid thing is present in StudiVZ, so they also just tell you that there is something new, but don't tell you what it is.

So, instead of a simple "read - react" cycle, I have to do a "click link - wait for browser to open - wait for page to load - search for the information in question - read - react", which is so time consuming and stupid that I really had to write this post (which, of course, takes probably as much time writing as reading one month's worth of stupid notification mails, but anyway..).

If you provide some web service that does e-mail notifications, please include useful, readable and compact information about the change/comment/whatever that you want to get through to your user. Just sending links as in "something's new, click the link to find out what it is" is just plain stupid :(

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