Tag Archives: mail

Designing Notification Emails: What you can learn from Friendfeed and others

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Email notifications for various actions(like new friend request, new follower) play an important role in getting a user back to the site and making them perform an action (accept/deny or follow back). Also, given the huge size of various social networks and thinking of these emails as a customer touch point it’s helpful to have a nicely designed notification email template. I’ve written a couple of posts on the same earlier too.

In this post I’ll try to compare the notification email by various popular platforms for the basic action of getting a new friend,follower, subscriber etc and see whose doing what and what could they do to make things better.

1) Twitter:


Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit profile; Direct Action: Block

This template is mostly good enough to decide if a user wants to follow back another user of not but by having a direct follow button would have helped.

2) Slideshare


Format: HTML; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: Visit profile; Direct Action: None

This template is plain and simple but it doesn’t have a display pic for new follower and it doesn’t have a direct button for an action. Also, it has two links which point to the same page, which isn’t the best thing .

3) LinkedIn

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: View Invitation; Direct Action: Accept Invitation.

While Linkedin has a direct action button they don’t have any detail about the user in question. Here again a picture or some more description will be helpful.

4) FriendFeed:

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: None; Direct Action: Subscribe back

Friendfeed has by far the best designed email notification template in which they have the display pic, last few updates and just one link to get direct action(subscribe back) from the user

5) Facebook:


Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit request ; Direct Action: Accept Request.

Facebook has changed it’s notification from the older one (active till 14th september 09). While they have definitely gone the Friendfeed way, the name  of direct action button is Login which doesn’t kinda look right.

Format: Text; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: View Request; Direct Action: None

6) Orkut:


Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit profile and Visit friends page; Direct Action: None

Orkut too like slideshare has two links to the user’s profile and a third link which reads ‘visit friends page’ but it takes you to a separate ‘add friends’ page ala facebook.  Also there is no direct call to action here too.

While there could be reasons for not having a direct action button for Facebook and  Orkut(because they need to group friends into categories for example) some sites like Slideshare and Twitter can easily pick this.{Tip 1}

Having two links to the same profile page is definitely not wise and needs to be taken care off {Tip 2}. Other tips like having some profile info and a display picture can help {Tip 3} in a direct call to action(button etc) {Tip 4} if there is.

As you might have noticed eventually every notification email has moved to HTML format as it has more options like better looks and including a direct action call. {Tip 5}

What do you think about these email notifications?

Gmail now has ‘Undo Send’ feature

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While this definitely isn’t a new update it’s a useful one and I am not sure if many people are aware of it.

For those who didn’t know, Gmail now has a undo button which can prevent you from sending erroneous emails. The way it works is that Gmail holds up your email for about five seconds(or more?) before sending it and you can undo sending of email in that time window by clicking the undo button

gmail_undo

But mind you this isn’t a default setting, you’ll have to work a bit to get this working. By default when you send an email you’ll be getting the same old message

gmail_sentTo incorporate this change go to Gmail settings(right top) and go to the labs section.

gmail_labs

Labs section is a collection of lots of new(and mostly useful) features that are in testing stage and haven’t been released for masses.  Look for the “Undo Send” feature there, enable it  and you are done.

gmail-labs-settings-undo

Though the Gmail Blog says the time in which you can do an undo is 5 seconds I’ve found it to about 9 seconds when I tried to time it a couple of times.

So what do you think about this feature ? Useful  ? Not Useful ?