UI Rule #2: Make it easy to unsubscribe

Here’s another easy win—never make users log in to unsubscribe from email notifications. For nearly every website, there’s no security risk in allowing users to unsubscribe without logging in, and there are many benefits, including goodwill from users and fewer spam reports. Unfortunately, most popular sites don’t take the simplest approach to solving this problem.

Bad approach: Twitter & Facebook

Twitter sends a lot of different kinds of notifications, and their approach to notification management is complex—as evidenced by their incredibly complex footer text, which wouldn’t fit into 2 tweets, let alone one.

Twitter requires you to log in to change any of their notification settings, and even after logging in, they don’t give you a simple way to unsubscribe from all email. You have to trawl through several dense pages of settings.

Facebook’s approach is similar—they require login, then you have to figure out which of their many notification types to disable.

Good approach: Yelp

Yelp does a great job. They let you manage all email notifications without requiring login—just click through from the email and you get a clean management page that works with just your email address.

Good approach: MailChimp (and Feedburner)

MailChimp and Feedburner (used by many newsletter senders) provide instant unsubscribe with a simple option to resubscribe if you change your mind. Clean and respectful.

Doing it the right way is easy

It’s easy to choose a UI pattern for your unsubscribe links.

If your service sends many different types of email, follow Yelp’s lead — let users click through and manage all notification types without logging in. If you’re sending a newsletter, let them unsubscribe with one click.

Make the right choice. You’ll make your users happier and reduce your spam reports.