Email as part of your product experience
Many companies today have declared war on email. It's difficult to escape the onslaught of campaigns and promotions touting who is the best at destroying email! The unpleasant truth is that email is actually alive and well. Most people in the business world use it on a daily basis to coordinate and communicate with clients and other team members. At Fuseboard, we’re diligently focused on striking that difficult balance of leaving email in the dust, along with an understanding that email continues to play a vital role in business today.
At Fuseboard, we strive to deliver our solution as a comprehensive platform vs. simply a mobile or web app. We believe you should be able to interact with Fuseboard using the devices and tools that fit into your or your clients’ daily flow. If you use the mobile app — great! If you prefer email — sweet! If you mix both, depending on the time of day or location — even better! As with most product endeavors, we depend upon our clients to point out our shortcomings and lead us to focus on optimizing Fuseboard for their workflow. With this in mind, we wanted to take a moment to share a bit of what we learned from listening to our clients regarding email.
Give them context
When something important happens in your product, you send a notification email to the appropriate folks. Our email notifications, although working appropriately, did not provide enough context or subject info for the recipient to understand the meaning at a glance, thereby, forcing them to login to obtain the required details. This additional step caused some frustration for our clients, and unhappy clients almost always ruin our day at Fuseboard. Through listening and then responding, we’ve adjusted our message to provide you with more context at a glance.
Make sure you give them enough information to understand what happened
Using a Fuseboard example, when a task received a comment we notified the task assignee. This was great, however, a few pieces of the puzzle were embarrassingly missing. The task and project name weren’t provided, thus resulting in a fragmented flow problem. Remedying this problem was simple — we shared a few wireframes with several clients, received awesome feedback and included the information needed. The solution was simple. We added the task name, the project and the comment that was written.
As we become consumed with new features or painful bugs, minor details can be overlooked. These details no matter how small, add up and eventually affect user efficiency and satisfaction. A simple adjustment to your messages provides the right context and can save hours of time for your users.
Let them take action
With context, give them what they need to take action. Nothing is more frustrating than reading an email and then leaving the email app to take action in another experience. For your user’s sanity, avoid forcing them to login into your product each time they review an email. Instead, allow them to comment or take action from inside the email. For example, Square sends a receipt to a customer after purchase. Inside the email, a customer can receive comfort in the knowledge that the transaction is complete and effortlessly add a review of the service.
Accomplishing this can be a snap using tools like Mandrill or Postmark to process inbound email into your platform such as comments, updates or new reviews. We’ll add a post that details this in the future. :-)
Summary
It goes without saying — people are busy more than ever! Most people become annoyed when they need to change their behavior. So our message is this: Strive to listen and understand your user’s flow and optimize your user experience for it. Empowering users to effortlessly understand an event and take action is an essential ingredient to their productivity and happiness!
