Pat’s Point of View

Far be it from me to criticise a fellow usability person, but there’s something rather annoying about Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox emails: the subject line and content don’t match.

The subject line for the email relates to the latest Alertbox article, such as “Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers”. At the top of the email content there is a very short summary of the article and then a link to the full version on the website. All good, no complaints, well done.

The problem is that there’s much more in the email than just that. A few ads for conferences, books etc but then there’s some actual content. In the case of the latest Alertbox email we find “Is the end near for text-box ads?” and “Registration costs business”. These mini-articles are shown in full in the email and are generally a good read. I find that I end up reading those rather than clicking the link to the ‘main’ article. I’m sure there is a distinction between these two types of content from the authors point of view (I suspect the shorter bits are more like blog posts whereas the main articles are fully explored ideas) but from a user perspective, the content I read is not what the subject line promises. Add to this the tendency to skip over the very top of an email since that’s normally where ads sit or links for mailing list controls and/or metadata (who, when, where, unsubscribe links etc). Text banner blindness!

So would most people prefer to read inline content in an email or click through to a website? Somewhat ironically, Nielsen has written quite a bit about the area of email usability, but nothing specifically relating to inline vs linked. Scannability is important, which would favour summaries and links. And I suppose if there are graphs, charts or other diagrams in the article then a text email is not going to be very effective yet a page on the website will be. But I tend to stay within the application I’m using, especially if there are hundreds of emails awaiting my attention. I don’t want to have to click through to read the article, which means waiting for the browser to open etc.

Maybe it’s just me…

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