How NOT to craft a product announcement email

November 14, 2008 • Comments Off

I’m a fan of Evernote, but I hate their emails.


Zoom in on Evernote email

  1. It looks like an intimidating wall of unreadable noise: Yes, even plaintext emails need to look nice.
  2. There are no high value nodes or targets. It all runs together. Related items should be “chunked”, and links need to be less passive. Why should I click? Can I do something or are you just giving me a boring reading assignment?
  3. It’s low relevance, and totally scattered. I don’t need to hear about Windows stuff, and really none of this has any bearing on me as an Evernote user.
  4. Bottom line: Nothing in this is relevant or enticing. Actually, they did link to an iPhone case with a camera enhancing lens, which IS relevant to my interests and my use of Evernote, but it was lost in the noise until I carefully re-read the email while composing this post.
    If your marketing email requires careful reading to find the gems, you’re DOOMED.

How to fix it?

  1. Much, much less copy.
  2. Only tell me the single most important thing that Evernote could possible tell an Evernote user.
  3. Make sure whatever you tell me is relevant and actionable.
  4. Fine, if you’re going to tell me more than one thing, limit it to three things, but make sure they’re visually chunked so I can make sense of it all.

Related Post: The 3 pillars of good email marketing are Interestingness, Relevance, and Actionability.

Posted in: Business • Design Tagged:
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FeedBurner ads suck

November 11, 2008 • Comments (4)

This is Google Reader displaying a FeedBurner ad in the ProBlogger.net feed:

inappropriate FeedBurner image ad for making money

Just seeing this once ensured I will never run FeedBurner ads.

Of course, no post here is complete until I complain about an obnoxious modal dialog, and The Rich Jerk™  does not disappoint:

I have got to stop clicking things out of morbid curiosity.

Posted in: Technology Tagged:    
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Obama, Bush, and alpha male body language

November 10, 2008 • Comments (2)

Before the 2008 election, the History Channel aired The Secrets of Body Language. It featured clips of world leaders with commentary from body language experts.

One clip blew my mind. In it George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and their wives were having a photo op in front of 10 Downing St. Bush was totally in charge of the whole affair even though he was on Blair’s turf. When Bush felt the photo op had run its course, he nodded to Blair and they walked inside. While walking through the door, Bush placed his hand on Blair’s back and ushered him in. Once Blair crossed the threshold, Bush patted him on the back as if to say “good boy”.

Today the Huffington Post featured an identical video, except this time Obama dominated Bush. Obama had the dominant handshake arm grab, he cued the end of the photo op with a wave, and ushered Bush through the door. Obama didn’t dominate the situation as thoroughly as Bush did with Blair, but it was still obvious that Obama was in charge. The behaviors are so similar that they almost look choreographed.

The Secrets of Body Language isn’t airing anymore, but you can get it on iTunes, DVD, and torrent. I highly recommend it to any student of human behavior.

Thanks to Micah Calabrese (see also: Micah’s habits improvement webapp) for remembering my raves about the Body Language show and for sending along the HuffPo video.

Posted in: Politics Tagged:  
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How Apple nails Fit and Finish

October 31, 2008 • Comments Off

This is the Trackpad preference pane on the new MacBooks:


Zoom

The bottom right is a video loop demonstrating the various gestures. When you click options on the left, the video changes to show just the selected gesture. Even though the new trackpad gestures are fairly intuitive, Apple went the extra mile to train users in a slick and effective way.

The iPhone is loaded with subtle but wonderful design touches:

  1. I use the iPhone to pipe music through my car stereo via the audio jack. When I get out, I don’t have to go to iTunes and hit “pause”. I just unplug the audio jack and it pauses automatically.
  2. When music is playing and I get a call, it fades the music instead of stopping abruptly.
  3. By holding “home” and “hold” I can take a screenshot of with the iPhone. A nice touch, useful for bloggers doing iPhone reviews, showing clients what designs looks like on mobile Safari, emailing friends screencaps from Google maps, etc.

My favorite example of the iPhone’s fit and finish is something most people won’t ever encounter: the orientation of the iPhone LCD polarization.

I have polarized sunglasses. I can’t tilt most screens — like the one on my Canon camera — vertically or the polarization blacks out the display. The iPhone orients the polarization diagonally so I can see the screen both horizontally and vertically.

The iPhone as seen through polarized glasses
iPhone as seen through polarized glasses

That’s downright considerate design.

Posted in: Design Tagged:    
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Modal Dialog Hell

October 28, 2008 • Comments (1)

I’ve written about why modal dialogs are almost always a bad idea before. Unfortunately I am not Emperor of the Internet (yet…) so annoying modals persist.

Offender: Network World

The Crime: Popping a modal for a “how can we make our site better?” survey.

Here’s a suggestion: don’t cover what I’m trying to read with a modal dialog. I can’t imagine that they’d get very good data from that survey. Only someone whose time is worth nothing would do a survey like that. It’s much better to make improvements by passively analyzing traffic data and use patterns.

Let’s be real though. You know this survey is about collecting marketing demographic data and not “improving the website.”

Verdict: Evil and Stupid

Offender: Xerox

The Crime: Popping a modal demanding to know what country I’m coming from.

They’re already guessing I’m from a U.S. IP address. Why not just set the country to their “best IP guess” and let users change it if necessary? If users try to download or purchase something that requires country confirmation, then ask for it explicitly.

Verdict: Hamfisted, but not Evil.

Offender: Michael Port, well known marketing person (I’ve heard)

The Crime: Worse than a modal, it’s a pop-over ad that obscures every visit to the homepage.

Something like this could possibly be justified if shown just once and if the offer was really compelling. Out of morbid curiosity I clicked it and got — not a super awesome special offer from Michael Port, but a cheesy greeting card affiliate program.

Look, if you’ve got something really great and you want people to use it, make it the main thing on your homepage, within the flow of the design. Don’t bash users over the head with an ad dialog that forces them to find the “close modal” button before they can see anything else.

Verdict: Inept and also evil because it uses modals as a new form of popup ad.

Posted in: Design Tagged:
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The one blogging disaster you can’t recover from…

October 22, 2008 • Comments (4)

…is data loss. I bet you thought I was going to say “zombie apocalypse”.

Zombie SEO Consultant
Probably drew the brain a bit big for an SEO consultant. Feel free to steal this image.

Usually I encourage people not to be afraid of blogging, because you can recover from  any blog-related mistake — except unrecoverable data loss. The worst thing that can possibly happen is that you spend years writing posts and then, BOOM! something goes wrong and you lose everything.

You can avoid that nightmare scenario with a solid backup strategy.

  • For self hosted WordPress blogs I use the excellent WordPress Database Backup Plugin. It gives you an admin panel where you can set up (and this is key) automated scheduled backups that go to your email inbox. Every day I get an email with a zip file of my blog database backup. I doubt my backup file will ever get bigger than Gmail’s 10MB attachment file size limit. My ~200 posts are only 600KB when all zipped up.
  • For WordPress.com or TypePad hosted blogs you’ll have to set up a recurring calendar event (say once a week) and manually “export” your posts and comments. WordPress.com and TypePad are (hopefully) totally secure and backed up, so you shouldn’t ever experience data loss, but it’s best to be safe.
  • Feedburner email updates are another option. Just subscribe to email updates of your RSS feed and auto archive them. It would be a pain to restore your blog from these emails, but at least you’ve got an automated secondary backstop, just in case.
  • What about backing up images used in posts, plugins, and custom themes? If you’re self hosted, you can FTP to your sever and download the folders that contain these. (For WordPress just grab the /wp-content/ folder which contains everything you’ll need). There is a WP plugin that backs up files, and a 3rd party blog backup service, but I haven’t tried either of them. If you know what you’re doing you could also set up a cron job to automatically backup your files to another server or your own computer. Remember, a backup isn’t a backup unless it’s in a different physical location than the original.
  • I’m on TypePad or WordPress.com, how do I back up images? You’re stuck, unless you want to page backwards for all those posts and manually save those images. The best thing to do is save any images you upload in a folder on your own hard drive. Note: all reputable hosted blog providers let you export your posts and comments, but they typically don’t let you easily export your images or template files. It’s a nasty bit of hidden vendor lockin.
  • How do I back up my WordPress/MovableType installation? The good news is you don’t really need to back up your WP/MT installation. If something happens, you can always download it again.
  • So what’s the WordPress Ninja Way? Here’s my setup:
    1. I use the WordPress database backup plugin to get automated emailed backups.
    2. My entire WordPress setup (themes, plugins, and core installation) lives in Subversion version control. This is like TimeMachine for my blog’s source code. This means I have a copy on my own computer, on the web server, and in my SVN repository. I can go forward and backward in each file’s history, and see every change I’ve made. I wouldn’t expect a “normal” person to know how to do this, but if you’re a developer, I’d say “shame on you for not using version control“.
    3. Important: my “uploads” folder that holds uploaded images and files is explicitly excluded from Subversion. It’s done this way for technical reasons that I’m to lazy to go into right now. To back up the uploads I have a recurring calendar event that reminds me to manually grab the folder via FTP.
    4. Also, I always keep my WordPress installation and plugins patched and up to date and I use hard to guess passwords.

Resources and further reading:

  1. WordPress Database Backup Plugin
  2. WP plugin that backs up files
  3. 3rd party blog backup service
  4. Havi Brooks’ ongoing series about dealing with blogging hangups
  5. Backing up your WordPress.com blog
  6. Official WordPress documentation on backups

Related posts:

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In the event of Zombie apocalypse, please keep blogging

October 21, 2008 • Comments (10)

Paul Boutin tells us to “kill our blogs” in Wired because the market (i.e. the first page of Google results) has been overrun by professional blogs like Engadget, HuffPo, and Boutin’s employer, Valleywag. Supposedly we don’t have a chance against their budgets, staff, and connections.

He’s right. It would be stupid to start a “gadget” blog today. Engadget and Gizmodo have that market sewn up. They achieved critical mass first so they get the leaks, the scoops, and the invites to trade show back rooms. No lone blogger could compete with that.

Boutin is also wrong. Today is the perfect time to start a blog. This is why:

  • As Paul Graham says, writing about something clarifies your thinking about it.
  • According to Seth Godin, your blog is now your résumé. Actually, having a blog is far more powerful than a résumé because blogs are discoverable, searchable, and followable. The last time I wrote a résumé it didn’t make me any smarter or better connected.
  • Forget traffic and revenue. The first artist painted on the cave wall to tell the universe “I WAS HERE”. He wasn’t out to goose pageviews for AdSense revenue.
  • Even if you were the last person on Earth, it would still be worthwhile to keep a journal. It would keep you sane for one, and second, it’s human nature. We’ve been documentarians from the beginning. From our first oral histories, to cave paintings, to Voyager’s golden data disc, we are a species of scribes.

Finally, time has proven that entrenched players are never invincible. Eventually their new hires care more about the paycheck than changing the world, and that’s when a David comes along who doesn’t play by Goliath’s rules.

While I was writing this my friend Havi Brooks of Fluent Self posted another in her “Blogging Therapy” series entitled: “Why even bother when other people are doing it better?“. Great stuff, timely too.

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