[Foundation-l] A designer? (was: Better user experience and retention through e-mail notifications)

[Chris Keating]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Dan Collins <en.wp.st47 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Apr 19, 2011 8:20 AM, "Tim Starling" <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 19/04/11 19:38, Milos Rancic wrote:
> > > MZMcBride's email about emails reminded me that every automated email
> > > from Wikimedia servers looks like a bunch of programming code.
> > >
> > > The first idea was that it would be better to have some better
> formatted
> > > emails with some more information (for example, I would like to see
> diff
> > > inside of my email when I get notification about changing my talk
> page).
> >
> > The main problem is that they are plain text instead of HTML.
>
> This is most certainly /not/ a problem. What would be a problem would be if
> MediaWiki chose to jump on the bandwagon of embedding huge external images
> in emails to users. Bandwidth? Tracking? Smaller screens (mobile)? Text
> interfaces?
>
>
Every HTML email should come with an embedded plaintext version which will
display in the event the HTML is unrenderable. Explanation here:
http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/why-bother-with-plain-text-emails/

Looking at my most recent email from LinkedIn, it provides a list of updates
from the people I know, each illustrated with a thumbnail picture of them,
along with new connections which have been made in my network and posts
people have made. The marketing reason for this is to get people to interact
with the site by telling them interesting things that have happened.

That is actually almost identical to a selection of changes to watched
pages, new pages, and watched talk pages. We also have quite a powerful
reason to remind people to get involved with our projects - we know new
editors are unlikely to come back. So should we take a leaf from LinkedIn's
book here?

Chris
(User:The Land)