Timers
Overview
Design elements are choices. While navigating around a site might feel natural, designers deploy a variety of tactics to guide your movements and collect your information. Newsletters are one such technique.
Newsletter prompts rely on a combination of short- and long-term benefits. Often these prompts will offer a small discount code on an upcoming purchase in exchange for your contact information. For the merchandiser, however, newsletters are backed by a more long-term strategy. They provide an opportunity to build a long term relationship by correlating purchase data over time and using different kinds of prompts tailored to your purchasing habits.
Newsletters can be hard to escape—both before and after sign up. Take for example the pop-ups which promote them. Often designers will bury or hide the ‘close’ button, making it unintuitive to bypass the pop-up without handing over your personal information.
Unsubscribing can be even trickier. Taking a cue from social media platforms, ecommerce pages increasingly bury their privacy settings and tools deep within their ecosystem. They bank on you giving up before you find the right page.
While many newsletters offer “unsubscribe” buttons at the bottom of each email they send, these often direct us to confusing lists of different kinds of notifications a company offers. Unsubscribing from one kind of message doesn’t mean you will unsubscribe from them all.
In the process, users get looped into receiving a constant flow of promotional emails or text messages from these companies without wanting them.
References
- Natasha Dow Schull. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012.