Hello! My name is Jayati Dev and I'll be presenting
our work "Why Johnny Cant Unsubscribe, Barriers to Stopping Unwanted Email" done in collaboration
with Dr. Emilee Rader and Dr. Sameer Patil.
Have you always been overwhelmed by unwanted
emails? According to a recent Radicati report, there were over 250 billion emails sent in
2018 alone, and we can only expect the numbers to go up.
In fact, marketing emails are by far the largest
share of consumer emails that people receive each day. According to the same report, of
the 94 billion consumer emails received by users, 76 billion are not spam but legitimate
marketing emails.
The massive number of emails people receive each day not only causes information overload
but also creates a network of personal information transaction that is increasingly hard to keep
track of.
And it is not that people do not try to manage
their emails.
They often leave unwanted institutional emails
as unread, or stash them in a different folder.
People also delete them from their inbox.
There are legislative measures too. The CAN-SPAM
Act of 2003 requires companies to provide consumers with a way to unsubscribe from emails
they do not want.
However, it turns out that even so, people
find it very difficult to go through the process of unsubscribing and are often unsuccessful.
Our goal in this study was to understand why this was the case.
We started with two basic research questions -
First, What are people's experiences about unsubscribing as a process? and Second, How
do they manage boundaries to prevent unwanted email from reaching them?
We recruited study participants through flyers
and classified posts. These flyers had a URL to a screening questionnaire, and participants
who met the eligibility criteria were invited for a 45-60 minute study session.
We interviewed about 18 participants between the
ages of 22 and 64 years, who had been living in the US all their lives. Since this study
was conducted in a college town, 15 of our participants were students, though nearly
equally split between undergraduate and graduate students with diverse majors.
We had a three-part study design. First, we asked participants to save the emails that
they would like to unsubscribe from before coming in for the study. This was to understand
what the different barriers were to unsubscribing, and what processes participants found particularly
easy or hard.
We then asked them to come in for a study
session and asked them to think aloud while they unsubscribed from their emails. This
was to understand the various mechanisms in which people unsubscribe from the different emails that they have.
Finally we interviewed them about their experience
of unsubscribing, both past and current, to suggest recommendations for process improvement.
From the corpus of 171 emails that our participants
unsubscribed from, we found that there were eight major mechanisms.
In increasing order of difficulty, three of
these mechanisms were easy, one was moderately challenging, and four were very challenging
for participants to unsubscribe from.
For this presentation, I am describing two
each from the easy and the difficult mechanisms respectively.
The easiest was the one-click unsubscribe
mechanism where a user could click on the unsubscribe link and get directed to the confirmation
page immediately without any additional steps.
An example would be the following, where if you scroll
all the way to the bottom of the email, and click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom
of the email, it redirects you to a confirmation page. This page contains only a line or few
lines of unsubscription acknowledgement that the process was successful.
The second of the easier mechanisms was the
unsubscribe link with confirmation. When a user would click on the unsubscribe link given
by the email service provider, it would show a pop-up verification to confirm.
In the following example, the unsubscribe
link is provided by the email service provider at the top of the email, which shows a pop-up
when clicked to verify (if the user wants to unsubscribe). This is followed by a confirmation
that removes the unsubscribe link from the top of the email.
Moving on to the more challenging mechanisms,
users would be lead through the unsubscribe through login system, where if they click
on unsubscribe, it would ask them to login. This would usually be followed by landing
page to the subscription center for customizing mailing lists. The final step would be receiving
a confirmation pop-up.
In the following example of unsubscribe through
login, when a user scrolls all the way to bottom of the email and clicks on unsubscribe,
it takes them to a separate login page (which sometimes involves multiple steps as you can
see). Once the login process is successful, users are taken to a subscription center,
where they can customize the frequency, channel of communication, and type of emails they
receive.
Reply to unsubscribe was the most challenging
mechanism, not just because of the process, but also because sometimes participants had
to reply to someone they knew on the mailing list they no longer wanted to be a part of.
This process would require them to compose an email and send it for unsubscribe themselves from a particular mailing list.
In the following example of reply to unsubscribe,
the user needs to compose an email in reply to the email received from the mailing list,
and hit send. This is sometimes followed by confirmation emails from the mailing list
indicating that the user has been successfully unsubscribed.
In order to understand participants' perceptions
of these mechanisms better, we conducted a post-study interview immediately following
the study session.
Our interview protocol consisted of 29 semi-structured
questions - 15 specific to unsusbcribing practices, 7 task-specific questions, and 7 questions
about participants' internet behavior and feedback on the study session.
We found that overall, the user experience
of unsusbcribing was poor. Participants had problems not only initiating the process,
But also conveying the unsubscribe request
and
establishing a successful process. Lack
of good email design with a distinct unsubscribe link made it difficult especially for users
with limited visibility, to unsubscribe.
Users also believed that they did not have
sufficient control over what emails they received. This was majorly due to the fact that the
subscription and unsubscription processes lacked appropriate feedback. Participants
were left wondering if the process of unsubscribing worked, and if it did, why they still kept
getting emails. Unclear feedback also had missing information on how long the process
would take and users had to wait for more emails for confirmation.
Like participant 6 pointed out, this made
them believe that the unsubscribe process would not work anyway.
Users also hated emotional manipulation that
attempted to disrupt boundaries between personal and customer connections. They wanted clear
boundaries in customer-company relationships. As P4 mentions, she hated "all these brands
trying to be your friend". Consequently, they also did not care about providing
feedback and would prefer not to enter information into post-unsubscribing surveys.
Institutional emails that did not respect
users' boundaries also caused them to question the legitimacy of these emails. Participants
indicated that they would not want to click on some of the unsubscribe links because it
was difficult to ascertain if they were phishing emails. Sometimes, mailing lists would send
emails with a person's name on it, which participants thought were "clickbait".
However, just because they believed that companies
were "sharing or selling their inforamtion anyway" did not mean that participants did
not desire firm boundaries. They wanted to be asked before being added to a mailing list.
They wanted restrictions on how many emails they received because too many meant that
"they didn't even want to shop there anymore"
Consequently, users looked for alternate ways
to enforce these boundaries. Leaving emails unread, deleting them constantly, and even
marking legitimate emails as spam were some ways in which people filtered large number
of retail emails from reaching them.
Thus, from our study, we found that there
were too many mechanisms of unsusbcribing that were convoluted and increased the cognitive
load it had on users. Current mechanisms were inefficient as well, causing them to perceive a lack of
control over their inbox. Nevertheless, users did want a way to establish boundaries from
unwanted emails.
Based on these three key takeaways, we put
forward the following recommendations.
First, a possible standardization in the process
of unsubscribing. While it might be challenging to convert all mechanisms into a single one
that users are most comfortable with, a few standard mechanisms that users do not have
to learn every time would make the process more user-friendly. It would also make it
convenient for email service providers to automate the process of unsubscribing.
Second, following good interface design principles
in consumer targeted emails would make it easier for users to unsusbcribe, should they
choose to. This would mean providing proper feedback about the process when it worked
or not, increasing visibility of the email elements, and reducing the length of the process
of unsubscribing. This would go a long way in reducing the learning curve that people usually have.
Third, allow user to set clear boundaries
by stating expectations upfront. As some of our participants mentioned in the study before, they
were often not asked for explicit consent before signing them up for a mailing list.
They started receiving emails right after they purchased a product after being automatically
signed up. They were also unsure about how often they would expect these emails. All of these
made them feel that they did not have sufficient control over what they choose to share with
companies.
Finally, one of the recommendations that also
came from our participants was having a way to mass unsubscribe from emails through email service
providers. Just like how people could delete multiple emails, which was also a common alternative
to unsubscribing, they wanted to be able to unsubscribe at large from emails they did
not want.
Therefore, in summary, unsubscribing that
reduces cognitive load for users, and incorporates user-focused controls has the potential to
improve trust in companies through efficient boundary control over the marketing emails
that they send.
Thank you for listening and please feel free to reach out to the authors for questions!