I have always hated the “opt-out confirm” step, and think that unsubscribe links in emails should be a single click unsub. This one though used some subtle placement and language tricks that I’d expect to see more from shady grey-hat email marketers, than big old-media magazines.

As most users probably do, I read the page left to right, skip over or skim most of the text, and my first instinct is to click on the button marked “continue”. Since I just clicked “unsubscribe” on the previous page, my mind is expecting at first glance, that “continue” will continue the unsubscribe process I have already started. It actually keeps you ON the list if you hit that button.

Annoying.

Here is an opportunity to have a QA job that has flexibility, variety and a lot of growth potential. Lexia Learning Systems develops, sells and supports a suite of software products that aid in successful reading instruction. We also have products that develop visual-spatial and logical reasoning skills as students navigate through a series of games.

Ad here.

I am not a professional designer, I only play one occasionally on the internet. I have taken some formal design training, I did used to live with a very talented professional designer, and I do have some very talented friends who are in fact professional designers, but I myself, am not a professional designer. I am however, someone who can distinguish good design from bad (or at least I think I can), and feel like I can recognize technical mistakes, sloppiness, and just those simple things that can set a real quality designer apart from the wannabees.

Why does this matter you ask? Well, recently I was tasked with finding a designer to do some long term contract work for the new company I am part of, and I reluctantly posted the position on Craigslist, knowing that I would get a deluge of responses, most of which would be unqualified at best. The hope when posting on Craigslist is that you get two or three passable respondents, and if you are lucky, one that is hire-able.

When looking for a designer via a classified ad, I always try to pre-filter the applicants by asking for a very specific and reasonable set of items in the response. The thinking is that if someone cannot follow this very simple bit of direction, there is no way that they can possibly be counted on to follow more complex direction relating to the projects that we would ultimately have them working on. This is exactly what I included in the ad, verbatim.

To be considered for this position, please send a resume, several relevant work samples (a URL to a portfolio is best), your desired hourly rate, your availability, and a little information on who you are. Inquiries that are missing any of these pieces will be discarded and not considered.

Not surprisingly at all, roughly 50% of the responses were missing at least three of the things I had asked for. Some even wrote single sentence replies, saying “I would like to be considered for this position.” and included no resume, portfolio, work samples, or anything else beyond that one phrase. Honestly.

Luckily, there are SOME people that were talented and able to follow simple directions, which was encouraging. However, here is some advice for you designers out there that are trying to make it in the freelance game. It’s a tough gig, and you need to be always scrapping for work. Remember that there are a lot of you out there, and you are going to be competing tooth and nail for every posting on Craigslist, with at least 75 other people, so you need to stand out. And sadly, standing out in many cases, may only mean doing the minimum of what is expected of you during the ad-reply process. That being said, here are some things to keep in mind if you are looking for, and applying for, freelance work.

• Read the posting and respond properly. I know this sounds horribly basic, but somehow this is the single most irritating and common offense that I have seen each and every time I do this. If a hiring manager asks for specific items in the ad, and you flatly ignore them and send a response that is missing pieces, you will be filtered out immediately. Screwing this one up shows a complete disinterest in the details and an inability to follow simple instructions. Very bad.
• Get your own URL. A top level domain costs $8, so ditch the geocities account and get a domain. I know this sounds a bit pretentious to say that those designers using freebie ISP URLs are no good, but having your own domain, given the non-prohibitive cost, can really go a long ways in making you seem more professional. Again, attention to detail and going the extra mile here is very important. Having your own .com is simple and cheap, not doing it is just….well…cheap. So get a URL and use it.
• Make sure the URL works. I can’t tell you how many times I get portfolio URLs that don’t work, go to error pages, or go someplace where I need to dig for the work samples. I understand that sites go down every now and again, but broken URL’s, and out of date pages with missing information are quick deletes in my book. Spend the time to make a specific page on your site and use it to store easy to find and nicely laid out work samples, and make sure it is in a place that is always up to date and working. And for the love of god, don’t bother sending a URL that you KNOW is broken, qualifying it by saying “my site is still under construction, but here it is anyways”. Honestly, use your head.
• Write a genuine and custom response to the posting. I am not looking for a 500 word essay on how much you love the idea of this job, but I am looking for some evidence that you actually are reading these job postings and not just firing off 50 stock responses per day to every ad with the word “graphic” or “designer” in it. If I am looking for a web graphics person, I don’t need three paragraphs on how “sick” your 3-D animation skills are, or other babble that is completely irrelevant and unrelated to my need. Oh, and if you are doing the copy/paste responses, please make sure to remove references to the other jobs you are applying to with the same email BEFORE sending it to me.
• Know the market. Maybe in 1995 you could command $125 an hour for some basic HTML work, but that’s not the case now. Sending me a quote of $95/hour for graphic design work, along with your AOL website is a joke. I completely understand that good design costs money, but don’t price yourself out of the game by not having a clue what the going rates are.

  I am sure there are some more things I will add to this list in the next week or so, but those are the biggies. Violate these tenets, and you may as well get comfortable with the idea of finding a real job, because freelance design isn’t for you.

  Oh, and I guess this is also relevant. When it comes to judging a designer’s work, I typically know within a minute or two whether or not someone has the skills to do the job. These are the immediate things I look for (once you have gotten past the above items of course):

• Strong use of typography. If you use Papyrus font on restaurant menus and Microsoft stock fonts for everything else, that is a very very bad sign. There are millions of free fonts out there, and the proper use of typography can really show that you know your stuff. Mailing it in on the font side though, is a deal breaker in my eyes.
• Properly used filters and effects. No need for gradients, drop shadows, pattern overlays, glows, and every other Photoshop filter on every graphic you have ever done. There is a time and place for filters and effects, and you should know when those times are and where those places are.
• Right image formats at the right times. Know the difference between gifs, jpegs, and pngs and know when to use them.
• Good basic design sense and understanding of balance, alignment, and color. Again, basic stuff I know, but somehow a lot of awful design work comes my way that just has no place in any professional designer’s portfolio.
• Understanding and following of current design trends and styles. Design (especially for the web) is a very fluid thing, and though obviously subjective, it is constantly evolving and moving…so if all of your samples have old stock imagery and lots of antiquated elements, you probably won’t make the grade.

And that’s that. If other designers and/or those that are tasked with hiring designers want to weigh in, the comments are open.

That said, there are two things that drive me nuts when it comes to wasted paper.

The first is ATM receipts. I am a Bank Of America customer, and have noticed that every BOA ATM that I visit has one thing in common – the trash baskets are overflowing with, and the floor is covered with, scattered ATM receipts. I, like most others, follow the same routine with every transaction. Put card in, deposit/withdraw money, take card, take receipt, throw receipt in trash. The lifespan of that receipt is less than 3 seconds in almost every case. I never keep them, and usually handle them just long enough to move them from the dispensing slot to the trash can below. What a waste.

Though the amount printed on the receipt is sometimes of interest, why can’t I just view this on the screen and opt to not get a receipt? As far as I can tell, with BOA at least, there is no chance to decline the receipt, it just comes out no matter what. And in the event that you make multiple transactions, say a deposit, followed by an immediate withdrawal, you get two receipts.

I am totally making up numbers here, but say the BOA ATM near my office handles 100 or so transactions per day, and say that is the average (again, totally flawed numbers I know) across the 17,000+ ATMs in the BOA network alone (they claim this number on their website). That is 170,000 receipts printed per day. Not an insignificant amount of paper produced from just this one bank, just from ATMs, just in a single day.

What if Bank Of America changed to an opt-in receipt system, as in you get no receipt unless you request one during the transaction? How much paper could be saved each year? It seems like a lot. Perhaps I am missing something here, but it strikes me as one of those really simple things that could have a huge impact on the environment.

The second waste item is phone books. Apparently the new Yellow Pages books came out last week for 2008. I know this not because I use them or care, but because I have seen a stack of them on my building’s stoop, and in the lobbies of every other building in Boston this week. They get dropped off at every residential building in the city, the number of phone books equaling the number of units in the building. My building having six units gets six phone books, the neighboring building gets probably forty or so of the big yellow books.

Like the ATM receipt, in my neighborhood specifically (which is about 80% comprised of people under the age of 35), the phone books exist simply to be disposed of. The life cycle is simple. They get printed and dropped off at my building. They will sit there untouched for about two weeks, and eventually someone, probably the building super, will move them back behind the building next to the dumpster and they will become trash. Spines never cracked, pages never viewed.

Now I know that unlike the ATM receipt, there are some economic pressures at play here that will keep these books showing up on my steps for years to come. The Yellow Page business is just that, a business. The Yellow pages makes money from ad sales, and ad sales is driven by distribution and circulation. However, unlike some magazines and newspapers for instance, distribution and circulation for the Yellow Pages involves leaving giant stacks of these books on the steps of people who don’t care about, and will never see their contents. Once the truck drops off the book, it is part of a circulation number that an ad sales person can use to sell ads into next year’s edition, and the cycle continues.

Although it would make much more environmental and logical sense to move the Yellow Pages to an opt-in model as well (no phone books delivered unless you request one for free), it doesn’t make business sense. The Yellow Pages knows that it if residents in my neighborhood stopped receiving the Yellow Pages unless they asked for it, no one would ask for it (or almost no one would ask for it), effectively cutting off their circulation numbers at the knees, killing their ability to sell ads and thus killing their ability to survive.

Yellowbook.com has a great graphic showing the life cycle of a directory. Fittingly, it omits the step that would involve a consumer using the book. At least they understand their own process!

So maybe there is more hope for opt-in ATM receipts than there is for opt-in phone books, but moving both things to this model would make me happy, and would save one hell of a lot of paper as well.

• I called J. Crew, to see if they could exchange a shirt for me. I had inadvertently grabbed one shirt in the wrong size along with three in the correct size, during a trip to the outlet last month. Trying to avoid an 80 mile round trip to Wrentham to swap one $29 shirt, I called customer service at J. Crew. to see if they could exchange the item via mail, or even give me some sort of pass to exchange for equal sale value at a regular store. The answer: “There’s nothing we can do…”
• I called Comcast to see why my bill showed a short pay of $20. Had they simply ignored the $20 promo coupon I had sent along with my payment last month? Their answer: “Wait up to 3 months and call back if it still isn’t processed. Right now, there is nothing we can do…”
• I called Blue Cross to explain that I had a doctors appointment at 8am tomorrow, and apparently my PCP was never updated with them as it was supposed to have been, presenting a problem for the morning doctor’s visit. Their answer: “The people that handle those changes are out for Columbus day. There’s nothing we can do…”
• So I called the doctor to see if this situation would force me to cancel my appointment. Their response: “Probably, but the girl that would know for sure is out today. There’s nothing I can do…”

Now granted, you can certainly argue that some of these little messes were my fault to start with, but still, why is the most common response to nearly every customer service inquiry met with some form of that phrase?

• Select Scenario: Work
• Select Gender: Male
• Select Lecherous Double-Entendre:I’ve got this huge doc, and I could really use your help getting it to fit inside the margins.
• Send To Co-Worker via handy SMS form.

Sounds like a great idea. Nothing could possibly go wrong here.

Other potential post headlines that didn’t make the cut:

“Sexual Harassment 2.0″
“Is That A Helio In Your Pocket?”

Well, at least I tried to.

After filling out this relatively lengthy lead generation form, I went to hit submit, and nothing happened. The form didn’t seem to submit, and no obvious errors were thrown. After hitting the button two more times and getting the same non-result, I scrolled to the very top of the page (manually) and found the error notification.

Buried amongst the intro text, and in the same font and font color, there was a vague error that said:

There has been a problem submitting the information, please check your information and try again.

No further info provided.

I scanned the page again, looking at each field, and submitted once again, confident that I had not missed a field…nothing.

Not much more to this story, other than a reminder to all of your form designers out there, especially ones that are presumably paying a CPC to get users to a form, and therefore live and die by the conversion rates of these forms.

Make forms easy to parse, easy to fill out, and for god sakes…make the error messages (when errors appear) clear and verbose! Error messages should stand out from the form text in color and weight, and should point you to the fields where the error is occurring (auto-jumping to the error), telling you exactly what the error is, so that you can fix it.

When CAN SPAM took the legs out from under legitimate email marketing (spam itself still thrives), a crap-ton of online marketing dollars went into the buying and selling of data via incentive and freebie registration paths. Companies like Webclients, Azoogle, The Useful, Adteractive, and others made a small fortune by dangling everything from grills and dolls, to ipods and gift cards in front of people – tempting them (and some would say tricking them) into signing up for all sorts of ancillary crap before leaving them high and dry with no prize, but lots of email and phone calls from hungry marketers who had bought their data.

Well….the bottom is now falling out, as the FTC is breathing down the neck of Valueclick, Aptimus is seeking refuge by selling their “technology”, and TheUseful is just plain on the run.

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. I for one, hope that these promos go the way of the dinosaur and fast, as removing this nonsense only helps to strengthen the good and legitimate lead generation marketers our there. But a big part of me is expecting it to play out much like CAN SPAM did, where new rules serve to only hurt those that followed the rules to begin with, while the slippery companies find clever ways around them and go on their merry way.

One of the zillion email lists, newsletters, update thingys I am on, is the weekly fare specials from Delta. I fly Delta a fair amount, and am always open to taking an unplanned trip if I see a really cheap ticket, so I set my alerts to come once weekly, showing Delta special fares originating from Boston and New York. For the first 6 weeks or so, things were smooth. Good fares, once per week, I liked it. I even contemplated if it was worth going to Cincinnati on a whim, simply because the fare was low (I didn’t).

However, for the past 8 or so weeks, my Delta weekly fare special email has looked just like this.

If you look closely, you will see that right in the middle (right where the fares used to show), it says:

Looks like we’re not running any special fares for you this week but maybe you will see a great deal for your family or friends. Take a look and let them know.

Having no specials is one thing – I get it. It happens. But why send me an email every week for nearly two months, telling me that you have no specials for me at all? To me, it seems like a crappy way to communicate with me as a customer. In addition to sending me a worthless email that I have to delete every week, it lowers my expectations of what Delta has to offer (No specials? Everyone has specials!) and begins to shape the way I rank Delta in my mind value-wise when I next go to purchase an airline ticket.

Two quick thoughts on how to improve this would be

1. Clearly say on the newsletter sign up page that there will be NO email sent out when there are no advertised specials in my area.
2. When there are no “specials”, just show me some of the cheapest fares originating from Boston each week, regardless of whether or not they are classified as “sale” fares…just show me SOMETHING!

In the meantime, I am just going to unsubscribe. Sorry Delta…

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the worst flight in existence for delays, is US Air Flight 1543 (Boston to Charlotte) which is late 100% of the time, with the average delay being 53 minutes.

I for one have had delays 100% of the time on EVERY flight I have EVER taken with US Air, some nearly missing me crucial connections, so this is not surprising. However, since Charlotte is their hub, through which most US Air connections are made, it may be wise when flying US Air out of Boston, to build in some extra time to catch that connector.