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What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of co

What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos. When they see a plain text email from a site they would be more likely to think they are being scammed than to be impressed at its simplicity and ability to display in the terminal. When every website is hacking around broken table layouts to get them to render in outlook (essentially Word), something is wrong and should be fixed.

badsectoracula 5y ago
How do you know that is what the average person likes or what they think? Are there any studies for these?
- lstamour 5y ago
  > Now, with the emphasis on imagery across the web, users strongly preferred images that could be seen full screen or at a larger scale, looked high-quality, and showed detail clearly. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/newsletters/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/newsletters/ (2017)
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    That article seems positively rife with weird assumptions, all to present email marketing in a favorable light. It's bad enough that I don't really trust the quote you gave from it. > Because several of these constraints have been remedied over the years, many of the concerns that users had about subscribing have disappeared. Read: Because we stopped asking permission and instead started spamming everybody who gave us their email address, people stopped thinking that not subscribing had any effect. > The increase in sheer email volume over the years has created a scenario where people can’t possibly give all messages their full attention, so they care less about what they receive because they know they can easily ignore the noise or choose what they invest their time in. Read: Our entire industry spams people so much that people know it's not worth reading. > It’s no longer used strictly to describe unsolicited email messages. Participants in our study used the word “spam” to describe solicited marketing emails that they considered random, impersonal, irrelevant, with too much promotional hype, or coming in high volume. Read: We required an email address for things that don't need one, then treated that as permission. How dare people consider our spam to be spam? > Now that organizations are required to include an Unsubscribe link in their newsletters, this task has become easier. If a company assumes that an email address given for identification can be used for marketing, or that it can be shared with third-parties/affiliates for marketing, then they are already pretty shady. I honestly have no way of knowing whether it's an actual Unsubscribe link, or whether it's a signal that the email address is actively read by a human and so should receive more spam. > If users keep getting unwanted newsletters, the messages will start to backfire and become regular reminders that they’re annoyed with your company. Better to let them go. This part I do agree with. Better still would be to not assume permission to send marketing to somebody just because there was a pre-checked both on a form.
- markkanof 5y ago
  I’m not the person you are responding to and I’m also a software dev (ie. not the average user), but I prefer a nice looking email that includes some simple graphics and formatting. So that’s at least one person that prefers that kind of thing to a plain text email and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I think we can probably agree that there is a large subset of the population that likes “nice looking” websites, so why would emails be different.
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  Emails are incredibly easy to ab test given a sufficiently large audience size.
OptionX 5y ago
Thats what the average web dev thinks the average person wants.
- brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
  And thus is what people have come to expect, sadly, IMHO. Except for the technically inclined/HN userbase. Though another comment said Germans prefer plaintext emails w/o attachments.
  - zaarn 5y ago
    Wouldn't say that is entirely true. Germans prefer HTML mail that amounts to simple rich text, ie bold and italic fonts, possibly some color highlighting if you're really daring. Pure plaintext isn't that well appreciated.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    > Except for the technically inclined/HN userbase. This community is as much an echo chamber as anywhere else. Just because an opinion is common here doesn't mean it's correct or reflects the wider population.
Jiocus 5y ago
Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. - Hume, D § https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/#ObjSub https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/#ObjSub
- cwhy 5y ago
  A commercial project aims for profit, not public service. The previous post explains why they are popular demands. And it is natural for commercial project to satisfy popular demands.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    QED: Beauty ≡ Profit
na85 5y ago
>The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos. I really don't think that that's true.
- jgwil2 5y ago
  This isn't an argument, it's merely contradiction!
  - bosswipe 5y ago
    Both the assertion and the contradiction are equally baseless.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    No it isn't! https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k
door101 5y ago
> What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos. Taste is generated. Cool trendy startups make "nicely designed" emails, users come to expect that. If scam emails looked "nicely designed" and Google sent emails in plaintext, the "nicely designed" emails would be considered untrustworthy. As a counterpoint, an "average user" wants software to work, and forcing every email client to parse HTML (which is far outside the scope of what an email client should do, especially with html as complex as it is today) often breaks things in unexpected ways. In my opinion, html and plaintext are both inappropriate for email. HTML is far too complex, and plaintext is a bit too simple. I think a markdown-like syntax would be the best balance, but I'm pretty sure that ship has sailed.
- kccqzy 5y ago
  You'd love enriched text then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text As far as I know, only old (possibly pre-Tiger) Mail.app in Mac OS X used to produce it.
  - door101 5y ago
    This is cool, I may have to play around with it
userbinator 5y ago
One oddity I've noticed is that Germans seem to like their emails in plain text, and without any attachments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226022 I've corresponded with others, also German, and they had the same preferences, even if not as explicitly stated as the examples in my other comment there.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  We used to have our German newsletter available in plain text and styled. The vast majority of people chose the styled version. Not even 1 % picked text. No dark patterns involved, a simple radiobox. We do not offer the text version anymore.
roydivision 5y ago
I posit that the average user doesn't want to put the time into reading plain text to find out if the email is worth their attention, images and colours are easier and quicker to process. A lot of information can be communicated quickly with some photos and a nicely formatted graphically rich message, probably with a large link button that takes the user to a relevant web page for further engagement. This is not an endorsement of the practice, just an observation.
smsm42 5y ago
But do they really? Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Either outright spam, like v14g4 and p3n1s pills (modern mail systems deal with those well enough), or only slightly more respectable spam like "you bought in our store once, so now we will hound you forever with ads for our good and services that you don't need anymore". Among this sea of garbage, there are rare islands of useful updates - like genuine newsletters I subscribed to, or email from my doctor about test results, or reminder from my bank that they are going to deduct that car payment, whether I like it or not, so there better be money there, etc. And of course Amazon shipping notifications! If all those need any HTML, then only the most rudimentary one. Of course, if you asked a user whether they'd want to get ugly marketing spam or beautiful one, I guess they'd choose the beautiful one. But that's not the right thing to ask.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cerved 5y ago
  yes, they do
- jjav 5y ago
  > Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Indeed. The number of HTML elements in an email scales pretty linearly with the probability of it being spam. Plain text is almost 100% certain not spam.
  - mijamo 5y ago
    My experience is opposite. I have never received a scam email with HTML, is always plaintext that tried to mimic a regular conversation.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      You must have a hell of a spam filter.
  - SirHound 5y ago
kevsim 5y ago
Fully agree. When we launched our service, we used really simple plain text mails and we had users complaining that they looking unprofessional and spammy. We didn't go crazy with our email design, and we're certainly not pushing the limits of what's possible to use in an email, but just adding a bit of color, a log and some text formatting made a big difference. Haven't heard a complaint since.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
varjag 5y ago
From what I've seen from average user, they tend to struggle pasting text with the same font into their email reply, struggle to quote parts of the message or email hyperlinks in usable manner.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos. Do they? Do they really like it? Did anyone actually asked? And no, A/B testing your design's capability to trick the user into paying you money isn't measuring whether they like it or not. I have an alternative proposal: average user just accepts what they're given, because they have no other choice. Nobody listens to their opinion (again, tracking and telemetry is not the same as listening to people). Abusive designs and patterns are adopted industry-wide very quickly, so there's rarely an opportunity for the user to vote with their wallet - after all, they can't choose something that's not available in the first place. On top of that, the average user lacks the mental models and language to conceptualize what is wrong and how much better technology could be if it was slightly less abusive. All they can do is accept that computers are annoying, and casually complain about this to friends and family.
- watwut 5y ago
  > Do they? Do they really like it? Did anyone actually asked? Oh yeah, they do like it and want it. That is why they use it. And yes, I talked with a guy who was literally like "I like the emails colorful and such, but we found through testing developers respond better to plain, so I send plain to them". Sometimes we are the odd ones and that is ok.
- oblio 5y ago
  Users want nice shapes and color. There's a reason the most popular media is video and images and the main social media platforms are practically platforms for sharing video and images. The average person all over all the world is almost functionally illiterate (literacy level of a middle schooler or maybe high schooler, at best). They really, really don't want text. They'll only read as much as they have to, and they will definitely choose images over text if they can.
- libertine 5y ago
  I don't even think it's a matter of liking or disliking, but more a matter of being blind to the standard formatting (something that most deal with on their jobs). At the end of the day if you see another blob of text, you either skim through it looking for what matters or you just delete/archive it. They could even hate it, but it just stands out for better and worst.
GuB-42 5y ago
I looked at the mail I really wanted to read from the most reputable entities (banks, government, business partners,...). Usually there is a logo at the top and the rest is mostly plain text with minimal formatting. A nice, colorful email, sometimes from the same companies usually mean one thing: ad. This is no different from snail mail, where important communication is usually on standard white paper while ads are high quality prints on nice goossy paper. And obviously, "average users" notice the pattern. Just like my father who almost trashed an important tax-related mail just because it looked too nice, he thought it was an ad. So the "average user" prefer to see nice ads, I can get that. But what the average user really prefers no ads at all.

badsectoracula 5y ago

How do you know that is what the average person likes or what they think? Are there any studies for these?

lstamour 5y ago
> Now, with the emphasis on imagery across the web, users strongly preferred images that could be seen full screen or at a larger scale, looked high-quality, and showed detail clearly. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/newsletters/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/newsletters/ (2017)
- MereInterest 5y ago
  That article seems positively rife with weird assumptions, all to present email marketing in a favorable light. It's bad enough that I don't really trust the quote you gave from it. > Because several of these constraints have been remedied over the years, many of the concerns that users had about subscribing have disappeared. Read: Because we stopped asking permission and instead started spamming everybody who gave us their email address, people stopped thinking that not subscribing had any effect. > The increase in sheer email volume over the years has created a scenario where people can’t possibly give all messages their full attention, so they care less about what they receive because they know they can easily ignore the noise or choose what they invest their time in. Read: Our entire industry spams people so much that people know it's not worth reading. > It’s no longer used strictly to describe unsolicited email messages. Participants in our study used the word “spam” to describe solicited marketing emails that they considered random, impersonal, irrelevant, with too much promotional hype, or coming in high volume. Read: We required an email address for things that don't need one, then treated that as permission. How dare people consider our spam to be spam? > Now that organizations are required to include an Unsubscribe link in their newsletters, this task has become easier. If a company assumes that an email address given for identification can be used for marketing, or that it can be shared with third-parties/affiliates for marketing, then they are already pretty shady. I honestly have no way of knowing whether it's an actual Unsubscribe link, or whether it's a signal that the email address is actively read by a human and so should receive more spam. > If users keep getting unwanted newsletters, the messages will start to backfire and become regular reminders that they’re annoyed with your company. Better to let them go. This part I do agree with. Better still would be to not assume permission to send marketing to somebody just because there was a pre-checked both on a form.
markkanof 5y ago
I’m not the person you are responding to and I’m also a software dev (ie. not the average user), but I prefer a nice looking email that includes some simple graphics and formatting. So that’s at least one person that prefers that kind of thing to a plain text email and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I think we can probably agree that there is a large subset of the population that likes “nice looking” websites, so why would emails be different.
iamacyborg 5y ago
Emails are incredibly easy to ab test given a sufficiently large audience size.

OptionX 5y ago

Thats what the average web dev thinks the average person wants.

brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
And thus is what people have come to expect, sadly, IMHO. Except for the technically inclined/HN userbase. Though another comment said Germans prefer plaintext emails w/o attachments.
- zaarn 5y ago
  Wouldn't say that is entirely true. Germans prefer HTML mail that amounts to simple rich text, ie bold and italic fonts, possibly some color highlighting if you're really daring. Pure plaintext isn't that well appreciated.
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  > Except for the technically inclined/HN userbase. This community is as much an echo chamber as anywhere else. Just because an opinion is common here doesn't mean it's correct or reflects the wider population.

Jiocus 5y ago

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. - Hume, D § https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/#ObjSub https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/#ObjSub

cwhy 5y ago
A commercial project aims for profit, not public service. The previous post explains why they are popular demands. And it is natural for commercial project to satisfy popular demands.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  QED: Beauty ≡ Profit

na85 5y ago

>The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos. I really don't think that that's true.

jgwil2 5y ago
This isn't an argument, it's merely contradiction!
- bosswipe 5y ago
  Both the assertion and the contradiction are equally baseless.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  No it isn't! https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k

door101 5y ago

> What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos. Taste is generated. Cool trendy startups make "nicely designed" emails, users come to expect that. If scam emails looked "nicely designed" and Google sent emails in plaintext, the "nicely designed" emails would be considered untrustworthy. As a counterpoint, an "average user" wants software to work, and forcing every email client to parse HTML (which is far outside the scope of what an email client should do, especially with html as complex as it is today) often breaks things in unexpected ways. In my opinion, html and plaintext are both inappropriate for email. HTML is far too complex, and plaintext is a bit too simple. I think a markdown-like syntax would be the best balance, but I'm pretty sure that ship has sailed.

kccqzy 5y ago
You'd love enriched text then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text As far as I know, only old (possibly pre-Tiger) Mail.app in Mac OS X used to produce it.
- door101 5y ago
  This is cool, I may have to play around with it

userbinator 5y ago

One oddity I've noticed is that Germans seem to like their emails in plain text, and without any attachments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226022 I've corresponded with others, also German, and they had the same preferences, even if not as explicitly stated as the examples in my other comment there.

Semaphor 5y ago
We used to have our German newsletter available in plain text and styled. The vast majority of people chose the styled version. Not even 1 % picked text. No dark patterns involved, a simple radiobox. We do not offer the text version anymore.

roydivision 5y ago

I posit that the average user doesn't want to put the time into reading plain text to find out if the email is worth their attention, images and colours are easier and quicker to process. A lot of information can be communicated quickly with some photos and a nicely formatted graphically rich message, probably with a large link button that takes the user to a relevant web page for further engagement. This is not an endorsement of the practice, just an observation.

smsm42 5y ago

But do they really? Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Either outright spam, like v14g4 and p3n1s pills (modern mail systems deal with those well enough), or only slightly more respectable spam like "you bought in our store once, so now we will hound you forever with ads for our good and services that you don't need anymore". Among this sea of garbage, there are rare islands of useful updates - like genuine newsletters I subscribed to, or email from my doctor about test results, or reminder from my bank that they are going to deduct that car payment, whether I like it or not, so there better be money there, etc. And of course Amazon shipping notifications! If all those need any HTML, then only the most rudimentary one. Of course, if you asked a user whether they'd want to get ugly marketing spam or beautiful one, I guess they'd choose the beautiful one. But that's not the right thing to ask.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cerved 5y ago
yes, they do
jjav 5y ago
> Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Indeed. The number of HTML elements in an email scales pretty linearly with the probability of it being spam. Plain text is almost 100% certain not spam.
- mijamo 5y ago
  My experience is opposite. I have never received a scam email with HTML, is always plaintext that tried to mimic a regular conversation.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    You must have a hell of a spam filter.
- SirHound 5y ago

kevsim 5y ago

Fully agree. When we launched our service, we used really simple plain text mails and we had users complaining that they looking unprofessional and spammy. We didn't go crazy with our email design, and we're certainly not pushing the limits of what's possible to use in an email, but just adding a bit of color, a log and some text formatting made a big difference. Haven't heard a complaint since.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

varjag 5y ago

From what I've seen from average user, they tend to struggle pasting text with the same font into their email reply, struggle to quote parts of the message or email hyperlinks in usable manner.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

> What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos. Do they? Do they really like it? Did anyone actually asked? And no, A/B testing your design's capability to trick the user into paying you money isn't measuring whether they like it or not. I have an alternative proposal: average user just accepts what they're given, because they have no other choice. Nobody listens to their opinion (again, tracking and telemetry is not the same as listening to people). Abusive designs and patterns are adopted industry-wide very quickly, so there's rarely an opportunity for the user to vote with their wallet - after all, they can't choose something that's not available in the first place. On top of that, the average user lacks the mental models and language to conceptualize what is wrong and how much better technology could be if it was slightly less abusive. All they can do is accept that computers are annoying, and casually complain about this to friends and family.

watwut 5y ago
> Do they? Do they really like it? Did anyone actually asked? Oh yeah, they do like it and want it. That is why they use it. And yes, I talked with a guy who was literally like "I like the emails colorful and such, but we found through testing developers respond better to plain, so I send plain to them". Sometimes we are the odd ones and that is ok.
oblio 5y ago
Users want nice shapes and color. There's a reason the most popular media is video and images and the main social media platforms are practically platforms for sharing video and images. The average person all over all the world is almost functionally illiterate (literacy level of a middle schooler or maybe high schooler, at best). They really, really don't want text. They'll only read as much as they have to, and they will definitely choose images over text if they can.
libertine 5y ago
I don't even think it's a matter of liking or disliking, but more a matter of being blind to the standard formatting (something that most deal with on their jobs). At the end of the day if you see another blob of text, you either skim through it looking for what matters or you just delete/archive it. They could even hate it, but it just stands out for better and worst.

GuB-42 5y ago

I looked at the mail I really wanted to read from the most reputable entities (banks, government, business partners,...). Usually there is a logo at the top and the rest is mostly plain text with minimal formatting. A nice, colorful email, sometimes from the same companies usually mean one thing: ad. This is no different from snail mail, where important communication is usually on standard white paper while ads are high quality prints on nice goossy paper. And obviously, "average users" notice the pattern. Just like my father who almost trashed an important tax-related mail just because it looked too nice, he thought it was an ad. So the "average user" prefer to see nice ads, I can get that. But what the average user really prefers no ads at all.