"You are receiving this e-mail because you attended an event, downloaded trial software or registered for technical white papers from Annoying Software, Inc. To be unsubscribed from all future mailings, including event announcements, please go to http://www.annoyingsofware.com/unsubscribe."

Before downloading your trial software, I made sure I unchecked the option to subscribe to your newsletter.

By insisting and making me:

1) open an unsolicited email about your product;

2) go to a page and enter my email again (as if you don't have it already) to unsubscribe from future mailings,

you are ensuring that I'm not buying your product, ever.

As Seth Godin (bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change) puts it,

You do 95% of it right, then use cheesy fonts or lie a bit or try too hard and boom, that's it.

Pages and blog posts with too many links embedded in the text are annoying.

In-your-face link advertising is the worse type, but even well-intentioned linking can become excessive, as you can see in this post about Wikipedia.

Irrelevant links are distracting. Just because there's a page somewhere on the web about a topic, it doesn't mean you have to link to it.

Seth Godin just shared some learnings from an alternative MBA program he created. One aspect particularly caught my attention:

It's interesting to realize that the way I did the application process certainly changed the list of who applied. Same thing happens with jobs, I bet. Your applicants reflect your methods.

Laura is a star performer. She recently started to apply for jobs with the goal of moving to a smaller city, and she has reported huge differences on the application process of large companies. The criteria she is now using to select where to apply has "user-friendly application process" as one of the most important requirements. Companies that demand that candidates create an account, log in, upload their resume and then enter again all the information (education, previous employers, years worked there, etc.) field by field, are not going to get an application from her. Simpler application processes, which may require registration but allow candidates to choose between copying and pasting your resume or uploading a file, or, even better, offer the option of just sending a resume and cover letter to an actual person, are the ones that she is responding to.

Employers should think about what type of people they are trying to recruit, and adapt their application methods accordingly. This is not to say that companies that create hurdles for applicants to overcome are wrong; it's just that an organization that makes candidates go through a boring, time-consuming process of entering information in specific fields is advertising that flexibility and consideration for employees is not to the forefront in their minds. Candidates like Laura are just thankful that companies are letting them know that so soon in their recruiting process.

1. Include in the sign up form a drop-down signaling that the user can select his/her preferred language.

2. Make sure that only the default language setting is available in the drop-down.

As a consultant who frequently works on site for client organizations, I am yet to see an intranet that doesn't frustrate users.

Here are the most common problems I've experienced with intranets:

Broken information architecture. Everything you would never need at a minute's notice is one click away: staff event photos, press clippings, corporate values. On the other hand, good luck finding contact information and important forms and how-tos.

Broken phone directory. Out-of-date listings; terrible search functionality that doesn't allow you to choose between last and first name for your query, or doesn't present the job title and photo along with the results, making it impossible to differentiate employees with the same name.

Broken search functionality. Simple queries such as "office locations" either return 74,000 results (none of the top ones containing the expected office addresses), or zero.

“If your users are using the search engine 70% of the time or more, it’s probably broken.”

According to this 2007 online survey from Accenture, managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and when they do find it, it is often wrong:

Nearly three out of five respondents (59 percent) said that as a consequence of poor information distribution, they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just can not find it. In addition, 42 percent of respondents said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week, and 53 percent said that less than half of the information they receive is valuable.

Related articles:

Intranet grassroots to greatness