11–20 of 35 posts
We expect too much from it, wanting it to be our todo list and other roles that it plainly wasn't designed for.
I email doesn't do what you need or want, then find something else that does. If you cannot, then build it and release to the world.
We expect too much from it, wanting it to be our todo list and other roles that it plainly wasn't designed for.
I email doesn't do what you need or want, then find something else that does. If you cannot, then build it and release to the world.
The user is not broken. Wanting email to be MORE than it is does not mean users are wrong. The fact is that email does not do what the average user wants it to do. Telling people to change their habits is...well...stupid.
Before anyone chimes in with "email isn't broken, but the clients may be". Whether this is a client issue or protocol issue is irrelevant. 99.9% of users do not know what SMTP is let alone why it is not broken. The email experience is broken. End of story. No blog post required.
I'm firmly in the "it's broken" camp.
What ever happened to "there are no stupid users, only stupid websites/applications"? The user is not broken. Wanting email to be MORE than it is does not mean users are wrong. The fact is that email does not do what the average user wants it to do. Telling people to change their habits is...well...stupid. Before anyone chimes in with "email isn't broken, but the clients may be". Whether this is a client issue or pro…
We should be adapting computers to work for humans, not adapting humans to work for computers. I agree that there are tons of improvements to be made to effective e-mail use in organizations. But many of the behaviors we exhibit are completely natural to us and difficult to change. For example, we check our e-mail on what psychologists refer to as a variable interval reinforcement schedule ; we know that at approxima…
Great comment enginous. I want to look into variable interval reinforcement now, as I've been approaching this from more of a research-based angle. The solutions should be hybrid, though I still believe that better behavior, reinforced by technology, is what will be the most effective. If you have your client reinforcing good checking schedules, that's a behavioral/technical win/win.
You might want to check out the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab's project on behavior design[0], which has some resources about how to use technology to change human behavior.
[0] http://captology.stanford.edu/projects/behaviordesign.html
Some people are using e-mail like IM and e-mail is built as an asynchronous communication system. In my opinion, that's where the friction happens. The author of this post brings up a great point about defining expectations on reply times. I think it's healthy to create an auto-reply that states that you only check e-mail x number of times a day.
What ever happened to "there are no stupid users, only stupid websites/applications"? The user is not broken. Wanting email to be MORE than it is does not mean users are wrong. The fact is that email does not do what the average user wants it to do. Telling people to change their habits is...well...stupid. Before anyone chimes in with "email isn't broken, but the clients may be". Whether this is a client issue or pro…
The big discussion lately has essentially come from people who DO know what SMTP is. And apart from "Gmail is slow", from what I've seen there's been a lot of complaining about mostly specialized use cases.
It's 2012 we have a 100mb up/down connection and yet I still can't attach a file over 10MB and not have it bounce back. I can't believe that any self respecting hacker does not see room for improvement in that situation. I should not have to work around that situation (yousendit, dropbox etc..) it should just work. I'm firmly in the "it's broken" camp.
so we got salesforce for CRM, getsatisfaction/others for support, jira for project management, tons of enterprise minded apps, yet people resort to email. why? its easier to just type in an email as opposed to logging in / filling a form, and last but not the least treating notifications sent by email in same vein as a human being.
Whats pathetic is "IT" sets up these apps and does pilot program and claims success.
I believe more idiot-proof-apps, as easy as email client app shows up, lesser will be "emails"