<p>Hi, everyone, </p>
<p>I figured I’d post in a forum full of people interested in Washington University in St. Louis (undergraduate alma mater of one of my favorite and smartest law school classmates) to talk about a technical problem with the recruiting emails WUSTL sends out. My son took the October 2007 PSAT/NMSQT as a sophomore. He’s been getting quite a few recruiting emails. After discussing colleges, he and I decided tonight was the night to begin clicking on links in those emails. The first email we tried was from WUSTL, a college on his let’s-think-about-this-college list. The email link, as I moused over it, was full of codes that were surely intended to identify the email from which the link was followed, and thus to personalize the reply to my son. But instead of the page displayed when we clicked the link saying, “Hi, [name of my son],” it said “Thank you, [some random name],” and indicated that some more information would be sent out to some student who doesn’t have my son’s name–and had better not have my son’s address. We thought that was pretty bizarre. </p>
<p>We tried some other emails of other colleges my son is interested in, and in ALL other cases following the link in the recruiting email led to a college webpage already partly filled in with name and address information of my son (obtained from College Board, of course), with human-editable form fields available to correct errors or add such information as a telephone number. I thought that was pretty slick. </p>
<p>I wonder why WUSTL, alone of the colleges my son responded to tonight, didn’t allow human editing of form fields and mistook my son’s name? I wonder if the WUSTL recruiting emails have ever been tested by a usability study? </p>
<p>[useit.com:</a> Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design](<a href=“http://www.useit.com/]useit.com:”>http://www.useit.com/) </p>
<p>There seem to be some common approaches in these college recruiting emails, that is some “industry standards” and user expectations that will be set by the five bajillion other emails that every student will receive as a sophomore and a junior, so We were surprised by the nonstandard behavior of the WUSTL email. </p>
<p>Best wishes to all of you applying this year. Good luck to all of you juniors and sophomores shopping for colleges.</p>