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Re-Designing the classic email client

vanschneider.com

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Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#181

Post by PaulHoule »

Many of the facile assumptions designers make about email are wrong.

The sanebox service, for instance, has the same wrong assumption -- that the problem is spam and unimportant emails.

The toughest problem I have in email management is important emails that are difficult to answer. For instance, before I took off for San Diego this week, I had to answer an email that required a prompt reply. This email involved an important relationship for which the circumstances had radically changed -- I wasn't sure what I wanted out of the situation or what I could do for the other party.

Given an email like that, my natural temptation is to put off dealing with them, so I have a plug of "important and somewhat urgent" messages sitting in my box at any time.

Spam and other unimportant messages, on the other hand, can be deleted in seconds, and pose very little cognitive load. If there's any real cost of dealing with spam it's that I have an itchy trigger finger and occasionally delete an email that I shouldn't.

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#183

Post by gcr »

Is anyone else seriously disturbed by the layout?

The whole page is a big giant JPEG full of unscalable, unsearchable text.

Google doesn't read .JPEGs. Kiss your SEO goodbye.

I can't zoom into a page like this. When I do, it's pixelated and you've somehow managed to screw up the horizontal scrollbar so I can't even read the text on the left and right sides.

This also makes the site completely unbearable under any screen resolution smaller than 1280x1024.

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#184

Post by prawn »

blhack wrote: post #62
podperson wrote: post #36

Don't fix email. Fix communication. Why, on my iPhone, do I have: 1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes) 2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems) 3. A phone app 4. A contacts app 5. Twitter 6. Facebook 7. Skype What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my…

In my kitchen I have: 1. A fridge 2. A coffee machine 3. A stove 4. A microwave 5. A blender 6. Mixing bowls 7. Measuring cups All I want to do is feed myself. Why on earth do I need to have so many different things to do it? To...most people, having a separate "app" for things that do wildly different things is a good . Skype and email fill completely different roles to me, and I suspect they fill completely differe…

Friend, what you need is a Thermomix... and $2k or whatever they cost! (http://www.thermomix.com.au for anyone who doesn't know what they are.)

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#185

Post by gcr »

dredmorbius wrote: post #147
saurik wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also "love" when I receive "thank you for registering, click here to login", and after staring at the e-mail for a bit, seeing no links anywhere at all, I realize that the well-meaning-but-sadly-still-full-of-fail website operator that sent the message went to the trouble of providing a multipart/alternative with a text/plain body part, but implemented it as "strip the tags from the text/html part: that should be g…

I have NO idea of what you're talking about ;-)

Let's pretend you're sending messages to your new users who have just clicked the "Sign Up" button on your fancy landing page.

The problem? They, along with a significant percentage of your other users, use text-based email clients.

This is the wrong way of sending text-only email:

       Thanks for signing up!  Thanks for signing up!Click here to finish your registration.
Stripping HTML tags is also wrong:

    Thanks for signing up!
    Click here to finish your registration.
This is the correct way of sending text-only email:

    Thanks for signing up!
    ======================
    Click here[1] to finish your registration.
    
    1: http://new-registrants.sneakystartup.net

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#186

Post by dorian-graph »

smacktoward wrote: post #69
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any other areas of your life where you throw the baby out with the bath water? Someone over salt some food so you assume that everything they say or do with food is wrong? Refuse to ever get a lift with a friend because they forgot to indicate once so obviously they can't be trusted to drive? I'm not wild about the way he's presented his website but I'm still willing to look at his ideas about e-mail workflow with an…

If someone presents himself to me as a professional cook and then proceeds to over-salt the food, yes, I do feel completely comfortable disregarding his culinary opinions from that point forward.

Where do 'mistakes' fit in in your world?

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#187

Post by tedunangst »

dorian-graph wrote: post #186
smacktoward wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone presents himself to me as a professional cook and then proceeds to over-salt the food, yes, I do feel completely comfortable disregarding his culinary opinions from that point forward.

Where do 'mistakes' fit in in your world?

It's hard to accidentally turn all the text of your blog post into jpegs. It reflects a deliberate decision (and in the opinion of people here, a poor one).

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#188

Post by Aloisius »

podperson wrote: post #36

Don't fix email. Fix communication. Why, on my iPhone, do I have: 1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes) 2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems) 3. A phone app 4. A contacts app 5. Twitter 6. Facebook 7. Skype What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my…

Context matters in communication. Each of those platforms has vastly different expectations of the speed of the response. By unifying it all, what you've essentially done is made me wade through every message as if they actually had the same importance and priority to me. They don't.

Now certainly some things can be unified, but let's not pretend like every form of communication is equal just because in the end, a message is delivered to the intended recipient.

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#189

Post by cheez »

podperson wrote: post #36

Don't fix email. Fix communication. Why, on my iPhone, do I have: 1. An email app (which required a major update to unite mail boxes) 2. A "messages" app (which abstracts out two different message systems) 3. A phone app 4. A contacts app 5. Twitter 6. Facebook 7. Skype What I want to do is (a) send messages to people (I don't care how), (b) check messages I've received (from anyone, using any method), (c) manage my…

Windows phone does this. It collects everything into one place.

Re: Re-Designing the classic email client

#190

Post by mnutt »

gcr wrote: post #185
dredmorbius wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have NO idea of what you're talking about ;-)

Let's pretend you're sending messages to your new users who have just clicked the "Sign Up" button on your fancy landing page. The problem? They, along with a significant percentage of your other users, use text-based email clients. This is the wrong way of sending text-only email: Thanks for signing up! Thanks for signing up! Click here to finish your registration. Stripping HTML tags is also wrong: Thanks for signi…

And most likely you only have a handful of these templates, so if you're nice you'll actually just put some effort into each one:

    Thanks for signing up!
    ======================
    Click here to finish your registration:

    http://new-registrants.sneakystartup.net
(it's much less egregious here than it is in some emails that have 7-8 footnotes)
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