IDblog: User-friendly email systems

User-friendly email systems

Ah, last Friday's NYTimes article about the White House email system (here on CNN) is making the rounds. It quotes Jakob, so it's getting a big pickup particularly in the web usability space. Bummer.

I don't disagree that nine screens might be a bit much in order to send an email. However, any organization that gets 15K email a day has to do something in order to manage that effectively. Things like pre-selected subjects help filter the mail so that they get to the right person sooner--and they also can provide for auto-replies which may well contain the answer the person is looking for.

I'm not arguing that some of the problems in the White House system shouldn't be fixed (in particular, I am surprised to have gotten a security certificate warning going to the system). And maybe I'm over-sensitive (we've moved to something similar, though I hardly think as problematic).

But the tone of the article strikes me as being illustrative of the issue that Don Norman was talking about in Business 2.0 (found here via Google's cache):

Maybe the problem is that usability professionals don't know how to make their pitch. ... They don't know the language of business. They preach usability as if it's a virtuous thing, not a business-critical thing, so the executive listening simply says, "Yes, it's a wonderful thing, but I have to get back to work."

Anyways, it struck me that an assault on the White House's email system without consideration of the business needs is in the "not knowing how to make a pitch" category. We can shame business into it, or we can make a better case for it. I wish the NYTimes article were more of the latter than the former.

12:14 PM | linkme | home

Comments

So let's make a business pitch. Here's a quick draft:

Improving the user experience of the new White House webmail system will benefit the White House by:

- improving the overall perception of the White House and the White House website;
- allowing citizens to send email more efficiently and improving the quality of the email received, thereby
- allowing email recipients to act on the email subjects more efficiently.

What are some other points we can add to the list?

-- Posted by Joshua Kaufman on July 21, 2003 03:19 PM

At the risk of sounding really curmudgeonly, the visions of "barn door" and "horse" come to mind. Blogs aren't bad places to have this discussion, but this is preaching to the choir. It's just too bad that Nielsen wasn't able to get the point across to such a wider audience (being fair, maybe he did make the point and it got lost in the editing).

BTW, here's another part of the Business 2.0 article mentioned above, with another Norman quote:

The way for usability professionals to get the attention of senior
management is to talk about dollars and cents. "We have to lay out the
costs of testing and emphasize as strongly as possible the return on
investment for dealing with usability concerns before you ship a
product. Executives know that service costs are enormous, the sort of
costs companies try to cut. It's extremely easy to make the case that
subjecting a product to usability testing up front eliminates service
costs and makes customers happier."

-- Posted by Beth on July 21, 2003 08:13 PM

Curmudgeonly indeed. The thing is that we can talk all day about *how* usability professionals can get the attention of management, but until we actually *do* get their attention, it's not going to matter.

-- Posted by Joshua Kaufman on July 22, 2003 08:50 AM