Today in the middle of submitting a job application I got hit by the roadblock - check your email, confirm your existence. Of course in the middle of an application the last thing I want to do is lose track of the job, open my mail program and click "Send/ Receive" until the message shows up in a few minutes.
For years now sites have been sending emails out to new profiles to confirm their validity and improve the quality of registrations/ submissions as well as help avoid spam from well programmed bots. While these emails make a whole lot of sense from the "data reliability" point of view they also pose a tremendous usability impact and have to be very well thought through and implemented.
So when should you use them and when you want to stay away? For the most part you absolutely positively need to avoid these when the user is in the middle of something. If someone is signing up to join a newsletter, sure, go on, have them confirm things. If they want to create an account just to have one for later use it's another great time. But if I'm in the middle of posting a resume, adding a user review or most troublesome, completing a transaction and you send me over to my email inbox, well, don't be surprised if your abandonment rate graph looks like the increase in gas prices - you can bet people are going to bail.
This doesn't mean you can't validate email for your system (although if someone's paying money I'd suggest you don't worry about it, a valid credit card is usually a good indicator they want to be honest) it just means you have to think about when. Looking at this resume site what should have happened is something like this:
In this userflow the authentication process still takes place and is still required for the submission to be completed but it's not a roadblock from applying - just from finalizing and finalizing is done after everything's been submitted, contact information has been gathered (so you can email people again who don't confirm but did apply) and the user is fully invested in the process. And of course if they can't check their email until a few hours later they don't have to remember everything they wanted to throw into the application process; they just click a link and are done.
Instead the process I went through (see below) was something much more complex is required with many more abandonment points (which is why I bailed). Even though there's a lot of motivation to complete a job application versus say a shopping cart, there's still a natural instinct to get frustrated or simply to forget.
Why give people the chance to bail in the first place when you can validate them after they submit information. And of course this is applicable to lead capture, email lists, resumes, even interactive communities (forums, blogs, etc...).
On an interesting side note. When I clicked the activation link from this site's email it sent me back to a login screen... only I didn't have a login which meant requesting yet another email to reset my password which again took me off the site. Yikes.
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