Summary

Confirmation email is one of the most important touchpoints for keeping customers appraised of the status of their transactions and for enhancing your reputation for great customer service. Good email usability can save huge amounts of money by reducing the number of telephone calls to your call center. Bad email will often get deleted unread; it'll definitely make customers feel uncertain and poorly treated.

The report contains 143 guidelines for improving the design of confirmation email and other transactional messages that are generated automatically by a computer (the report doesn't cover human-authored customer service). The report is richly illustrated with 99 color screenshots of many different email messages, showing usability problems we found in our testing as well as examples of highly-usable transactional email.

> sample chapter as thumbnail pages
> Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox summarizing the report

This report is based on empirical usability testing and shows what happens when real users interact with real email, starting with the inbox (where many messages get deleted ruthlessly), and continuing with the actual content of the message.

We observed a broad range of test users as they processed 92 transactional email messages. Most were confirmation emails, covering the following categories:

• Agreement change notices indicate updates to privacy policies, credit card terms, membership details, and so on.
• Available-now notices provide requested notification when some condition has been met, such as a sold-out item being back in stock.
• Billing and payment notices provide information about a recent or scheduled payment.
• Cancellation, return, refund, rebate, and bonus notices explain details of money or rewards the recipient receives from a company
• Customer service messages confirm receipt of a message or send a standard response to common inquiries.
• Failure notices alert recipients about a failed transaction or query.
• Government responses are replies to citizen inquiries or comments from officials and government offices.
• Information posting notifications confirm that an individual's message, opinion, or item has been successfully posted on a public website.
• Information request responses are personalized messages from a specific individual or department in response to user queries or concerns
• Meeting confirmations summarize appointment details or alert the meeting organizer about necessary changes or updates.
• Order and service confirmations provide order or service details whenever someone makes a purchase online.
• Profile-update notifications inform registered users of changes to personal information.
• Recommendations from friends inform friends, family members, or colleagues about a recommended product or service by sending information through a website service. (Also known as "tell-a-friend" features.)
• Registration and account information messages welcome new users who have registered with a website; these messages often include login details.
• Reservation confirmations and e-tickets confirm details for travel, hotel rooms, movie tickets, motor vehicle rentals, and so on.
• Shipment and pickup notifications alert customers when an ordered item has shipped.
• Social networking updates notify users about online community changes that are typically initiated by community members.
• Status notifications indicate that a change or update has occurred.

Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary
   • User Research: Two Studies
   • Surviving Spam-Filled Inboxes
   • Avoid or Minimize Message Sequences
   • Tell Users What They Want to Know
   • Transactional Email Builds Trust
   • Trends in Transactional Email Usability
   • Messages from Third-Party Users
   • Unchanged: Message Usability
   • Bypassing Search Engines as Gatekeepers
2. Overview of the Usability Studies
   • How To Use This Report
3. How People Use and Manage Email
   • Spam and Phishing
4. How Email Affects Trust
   • Measuring Trust
   • Phishing and Trust
5. Common Problems with Transactional Email
6. Design Guidelines
7. General Guidelines: Subject, Sender, and Message Body
   • From: (Sender Information)
   • Subject: (Topic)
   • To: (Recipient Information)
   • Message Body
   • Recommended Features for All Transactional Messages
   • Message Sequences
   • How to Distinguish your messages from Phishing Messages
8. Guidelines by Type of Message
   • Agreement Change Notices
   • Available-now Notices
   • Automated Customer Service Messages
   • Information Request Responses
   • Status Notifications
   • Registration and Account Information
   • Profile-update Notifications
   • Information Posting Notifications
   • Recommendations from a Friend
   • Social Network Notifications
   • Government Responses
   • Meeting Confirmations
   • Billing and Payment Notices
   • Reservation Confirmations and E-tickets
   • Order and Service Confirmations
   • Shipment and Pickup Notifications
   • Cancellation, Return, Refund, Rebate, and Bonus Notices
   • Failure Notices
9. Average Subjective User Ratings by Attribute
   • Trust
   • Completeness
   • Value
   • Ease of Use
   • Writing
   • Design
10. Methodology
11. Considerations When Planning Your Own Email Studies
12. Appendix
    • From and Sender Information Tested in Studies

What You Get

• Checklist of 143 specific design recommendations: review your email design for these 143 items, and you will discover several things that need improvement.
  • The average website typically violates about half of our usability guidelines. You might have the one perfect site in the world that does everything right, but the odds are against you. It is safest to score your design against a checklist of usability guidelines to make sure you don't do anything wrong.
• Description of how users behave when using a wide variety of email messages, including extensive quotes (often colorful, because they were often annoyed). Learn from the users' comments and reactions to common design mistakes we tested.
• 99 screenshots of transactional emails with descriptions of why they worked well for users or caused them problems in usability testing.
• Inbox view of 33 emails in three popular mail programs with data showing how many users would open each message
• $80,000 of user research at 0.1% of the cost.
• Test methodology description, allowing you to run your own user tests of your own emails.

Comparing the Editions

If you already own the 1st edition of this report, should you buy the 2nd edition? Probably not, because the guidelines in the first edition were confirmed in Study Two (though some were refined in the new edition).

Comparison of the editions:

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who designs automated email messages. (Remember, even if you don't think of yourself as a "designer," you're designing a part of your organization's user experience when you're writing or implementing transactional messages.)
• Executives in charge of Internet communications strategy or online customer service.

Running a similar series of usability studies yourself to collect comparative design lessons from a large number of emails would cost more than $80,000 and several months of an experienced usability professional's time.

Even just collecting your own sample of message would require at least 10 hours full-time work, and the cost of sample purchases to generate enough confirmation messages would be much more than the modest price of this report.

Please help us continue publish low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read the report. If you only need it for yourself, then that's obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.

Download Report from eSellerate (254 pages) $119 for the PDF file with a single-user license $224 for a site license to make copies and place on your intranet