Envelope Usability
It’s a well-known fact that those of us who make our living in the usability / user-centered design industry tend to have a diminished tolerance for a lack of usability in everyday objects. Here’s my latest obsession: Return Envelope usability.
I’m talking, of course, about the little tear-off stubs and return envelopes that most companies helpfully provide along with their bills. Now, you would think that the requirements for designing these apparatuses would be pretty minimal and straightforward and that most companies would have no trouble getting the design right. But you would be wrong. So, for the benefit of all these hapless vendors, I present the following Worst Practices* for Return Envelope Design:
Non-perforation
If you are going to require that I return a little stub from the bottom of the invoice with my payment, at least have the decency to perforate the page so I can easily tear it off. A printed dotted line, with a little illustration of a scissor and the words “cut here” just doesn’t cut it (pun intended). Inevitably, I try to tear it off and leave a little stub that needs to be crushed or folded back in order to fit into the envelope. How much money can you possibly save by failing to perforate? Is it worth the customer aggravation?
The Origami Effect
I don’t mind sending back a stub with my payment, but several of my vendors require that I send back an entire page! You sent me this page in the first place, why do you now need me to send it back? Just keep the darn page and put my check with it when I send it to you. Of course, in order to return the whole page, I have to re-fold it just so (according to the unhelpful “fold here” lines at the page’s edge) and cram it into the envelope when I fail to accurately predict the exact one-third fold spot required.
The Mini
Ok, I’m all in favor of saving paper. But is it really necessary to miniaturize your bills — as well as the return envelopes? All this accomplishes is to make the bills harder to read and, most annoyingly, to require that I fold my check in order to stuff it into the envelope (are you listening, Verizon?). This may not seem like a big deal, but when you pay a lot of bills at a sitting you get into a kind of assembly-line rhythm and it totally throws you off if one of your checks needs to be specially folded into the envelope.
The Shorty
Oddly, this may be the most frustrating of all the Worst Practices. Because it seems like everything is going fine; you have a nice perforated stub, it appears to fit easily into a regular sized-envelope… But wait! The envelope is just a tiny bit too short to accommodate the height of standard-sized business check. A smaller personal check would be fine, but the large printer checks — used by virtually every business in the United States, peeks over the top of the envelope just slightly. Not enough to make it possible to fold it down easily, but just enough for the edge of the check to get annoyingly caught up in the envelope flap as you fold it down to seal it! Ok, this is a peeve, I admit it…
Just in case you billers out there in blogland can’t see yourselves in the above-described practices, allow me to offer the following easy-to-follow guidelines for your return envelope designs:
— If you require a return stub, please perforate it for easy separation
— Do not ask your customers to return an entire page with their checks. We don’t believe that this is really necessary, and if you don’t quit it we’ll just stop returning the page altogether
— The return envelope should be of a size that comfortably accommodates a standard business check and the perforated return stub. This should be easy, since the standard A10 envelope is coincidentally the perfect size.
Follow these guidelines and I guarantee happy — though not necessarily on-time — payers.
* I swear on my checkbook that all of these observations are based on actual bill-paying experience.
