USPS keeps things difficult

By
Angie Herrera

On the web there's always talk about making things easier to use for the site visitor. In particular, making sure your various notification messages are clear and easy to understand. For instance, when a required field on a form isn't properly filled out or left blank, care and attention should be paid to how the notice is displayed for the user. Offline it's harder to spot similar situations but not impossible. Take the US Postal Service. When you mail something out and the address isn't valid, you'll get the piece of mail back with some sort of message telling you they couldn't mail it or forward it. Sometimes, if you've written the address incorrectly, you'll get a clipart stamp with a statement reading: > Not deliverable as addressed > Unable to forward And sometimes you'll instead get a big yellow label that will read the same thing or maybe "Insufficient Address; Unable to Forward." Okay, well both are kind of useful. There was something wrong with the address. No biggie. A couple of weeks ago we sent out a small mailing for [TopSalonJobs.com](http://www.topsalonjobs.com/). A few of the postcards came back with the big yellow label that instead read: > Return to sender > Unknown reason > Unable to forward Wait, what was that? "Unknown reason"? Well there **must** be *some* reason it couldn't be forwarded. Was there no forwarding address? Did the forwarding address expire? Does the place not exist anymore? Seriously, how is "unknown reason" helpful? Talk about bad user messages.