If you’re only going to do one thing then you better do it really well

Unfortunately, this is a lesson that Skype seems to be struggling with. Given that its primary function is messaging (instant, voice or video) I can’t understand how they do a worse job of it than some of their competitors who only do those things as extra features.

I’ve been a long-time user of Skype and there are situations where it is quite useful. Unfortunately, as an instant messaging platform it has gone downhill massively for me recently.

There have always been times when messages didn’t arrive for a while (sometimes days) and then all arrived at once. I don’t use the notifications on my phone because it’s not clever enough to understand when I’m already using my laptop and have seen a message, or am actively in a conversation and so pings every single time someone messages regardless.

There have always been some drawbacks, but for a good while it was one of the best messaging apps out there, so I persevered.

More recently, I’ve had a problem with the mobile version continually setting my status as “Available” even if I wanted my status set as “Invisible” – that’s a new bug which irritates the hell out of me, but more importantly, it is someone else’s product which has really made realise how bad a job Skype sometimes does.

I learned of the competing system because my family use Facebook chat and so eventually I relented and installed the Facebook chat app on my mobile – I was very pleasantly surprised. Messages are pretty much instant and while we were away recently I tried to do a voice call to a UK landline using Skype - it was so poor quality it was unusable. I immediately switched to Facebook chat and that worked perfectly and was lovely and clear.

Facebook chat also won’t ping my mobile if I’m using a browser to talk – I can also mute notifications for a specific conversation for period of time too – all really sensible and useful features.

Why is it then that Facebook – who only do a chat app as a secondary feature – can do a far better job of it than Skype? It’s a shame that Facebook chat isn’t really suited to a business environment – I just hope Skype pulls their finger out soon and catches up with the best in the market.

Pathetic unsubscribe mechanisms drive me crazy!

I suspect most of us are inundated with spam email these days. Some of it comes from unknown sources - that's true spam in my book but plenty of other email messages come from a retailer or mailing list I signed up to once upon a time.

Over time, I find that either they send me far too many emails or I just get bored of the content. If I notice that I'm not reading the content of emails from a particular retailer or mailing list for a while then I tend to unsubscribe to cut down on the volume of stuff in my inbox.

Doesn't sound too complicated so far does it? Well, the problem is that I have a number of email addresses that all go into my inbox. The problem then comes when I click on an "unsubscribe" link in an email and I'm presented with a stupid form that asks me to enter my email address.

"Stupid form" is quite a general description so let me explain further. If this was a "smart form" then it would know who I was. The retailer has sent me an email that generally is personalised to me (it normally has at least my name in it) and so they should easily be able to track which email address they sent the email to. Instead they make me play a guessing game where I have to try various email addresses until I find the one that they sent the email to.

That's bad enough but in fact, some unsubscribe mechanisms are much, much dumber than that. Let's take Aldi as a prime example. I subscribed to their newsletter a while ago but I then got multiple emails a week advertising baby food and all sorts of other "special offers" that had no relevance to me. So, I decided to unsubscribe and that's where the pain started...

Now in Aldi's defence, they did tell me the email address that the email had been sent to at the bottom of the page. That said, I could easily tell that their unsubscribe link is personalised but their form still doesn't know which email address I want to unsubscribe from.

Clicking the link takes me to a ridiculously slow loading web page (it took 25 seconds when I tested on a nice fast connection) and then I see the "Subscribe to our newsletter" page that looks like this

My screen is fairly large but I still can't see anything on the screen that talks about unsubscribing until I scroll down the page at which point I see this form

ok - at last I'm getting somewhere - so I filled in the only mandatory field on the form and clicked "Newsletter unsubscribe". Sadly, there are no bounds to the Aldi web team's stupidity - I got put back at the top of the form where I was unable to see the error message that is being presented for me. That requires me to scroll down again at which point I see this

Oh great - so a field that isn't marked at mandatory is actually mandatory even though there's only one option and I'm unsubscribing so it should be fairly obvious what I want to unsubscribe from. Still, I'm nearly there so I tick the box and hopefully leave the mailing list forever.

Unfortunately for me - the first time I tried this I went through the whole process on my mobile only to reach the end of the process and be told it wasn't possible to unsubscribe. 

Wow - how stupid is this process! If they have a dedicated page to say that I couldn't unsubscribe then why the hell can't they record my email address and say that they'll fix it for me later?

Sometimes - even processes that should be incredibly simple and pain free for the end user end up being complicated beyond belief by bad development. I'm sure there were undoubtedly some "geniuses" in corporate meetings who thought it was all excellent - they should get at least some of the blame too. I also realise that there is a possibility that the developer(s) protested at how crap this all was and was shouted down by their managers but there are also lots of bad developers out there!

The UX of any interaction between your clients and your website is vitally important and even big companies sometimes show just how badly it is possible to do it. When designing a system you should always try and experience the system from the customer's perspective - make sure you know how painful it is to use the system so you can make it better!