danielbower.com

A Recipe for Tinto de Verano

This is a hangover from a recent trip to San Sebastien. In fact it wasn’t just any trip, it was the 3rd Annual eConversions company holiday. 25 people descend on some poor, unsuspecting town in Europe and try their best to consume everything it has to offer. Barcelona 08 was “street beer”, Athens 09 was dominated by tomatos, and San Sebastien 10 was the year of Tinto de Verano, or “Red Wine of Summer”, a refreshing cocktail of red wine, ice, a slice of lemon and Casera.

If you can’t pick up a bottle of Casera down your local Costcutter, here’s an alternate recipe.

• 2/3 Red Wine (cheap is fine, don’t waste your best Rioja).
• 1/3 Lemonade
• 4 Cubes of Ice
• A Slice of Lemon
• A dash of water to get rid some of the bubbles.

It’s a fantastic drink, I’ve had 15 today already.

Photo by indrasensi on Flickr.

David Miliband’s Email for Change

I’ve just received my first email from David Miliband, and as someone who thinks he knows a thing or two about email I thought I’d share an opinion or two.

First thing to note is that it’s been written in HTML.

Now I’m not totally against HTML emails, they offer a level of branding exposure that you won’t get with text, however in this context I think it was a poor choice, and here’s why.

Getting personal

Text is more personal. It’s the equivalent of a hand written thank you card at Christmas rather than a typed one that probably used a mail merge. Even if David himself actually wrote this, knowing it subsequently went to a mark-up kid means it looses a little of it’s shine.

When vital messages get lost

David’s email is actually a very light on HTML. I’ve taken to calling this ‘rich text’ meaning it doesn’t rely too heavily on tables and images to covey a message, you get 90%+ of it from the text alone.  If you rely too heavily on images you run the risk of vital messages being lost as email clients typically don’t allow images to be displayed until the recipient agrees to it. This is particularly important if it’s the first email and the recipient hasn’t had a chance to add you to their safe list.

David’s team deserve credit in this respect. The header image doesn’t cause material damage to the email if it doesn’t load, and the body of the email is all text. In fact, they only make use of one ‘a’ tag, and that’s for no apparent reason in the post script. Every other link is written out in full which 99% of email clients will convert automatically - it’s almost as if this was meant to be text! And then, just as you’re about to give him the perfect 10 he does this:

Follow you? But, which link do I click David? I suppose I could just guess… Ok, I being unfair, it’s actually really powerful to use the Twitter and Facebook branding to good effect in an email, however not including an alt tag to guide those who haven’t accepted your images is a massive mistake.

Other small changes

A clear unsubscribe link is vitally important. Studies have shown that users are increasingly hitting ‘spam’ rather than unsubscribing from email lists even if it’s not junk. In fact this has lead ESPs such as Gmail to develop tools to combat this habit as a way of helping good senders.

I personally would include an unsub link at the top of an email, but if you’re not going to do that, at least have some clear descriptive text around it. David’s email lacks in this area, and yet it can be solved with some as simple as:

You can instantly unsubscribe from these emails by clicking the link below

Last of all there’s the ‘from name’

David Miliband, DavidMiliband.net

just seems a little odd. Just David Miliband would suffice.

I’ve signed up to all the other candidates emails too, I’ll be back with some thoughts on how they do later.

UX with 6-Packs, 4-Packs and The Can

Ever since watching Leah Buley’s brilliant talk at SXSW about being a UX team of one I’ve been obsessed with what she calls the 6-up.

The 6-up is a single piece of A3 paper with 6 browser window’s printed on it. The goal is to get you sketching your ideas right away, rather than bogging yourself down with feature lists and Photoshop files like you normally would. It also reinforces her principle of having “six ideas rather than one,” something I’m a firm believer in.

While using the 6-up during my work on VoucherCodes.co.uk I’ve come across a few changes - and a few additions - that have really helped me. I thought I’d share them here.

Leah’s 6-up includes a notes section. I completely understand the rationale behind this but I’ve found it to be superfluous. While sketching with the 6-up it’s felt natural to just add comments around the sketch, rather than using a designated space to the right. If you remove the notes section, and add more negative space around each browser window, you’ll find you have a lot more freedom to work.

There is also times when 6 windows doesn’t allow for enough detail. The 1-up, as Leah calls it, is a great solution to this. However a 1-up can be made even more useful by moving it from a piece of A3 to a piece of a A4. The reason? Most companies, particularly startups, are unlikely to own an A3 printer. Transferring the 1-up to a piece of A4 gives you a good amount of space, the flexibility to print them more often, and it does it all for a lower cost.

For exactly the same reasons I introduced a 4-up. This gives you the opportunity to play with multiple ideas, while keeping those A3 printing costs down.

The last thing I did was change the name. 6-up, 4-up and 1-up just didn’t sit well with me. Yes, I loved the retro gaming motif, but I needed to give it my own slant. So in our office we refer to them as; The 6-pack, The 4-pack and The Can. Evidence of a British booze culture? Maybe.

Feel free to download my versions using the links below. In fact, feel free to change them, criticise them and ignore them as you see fit.

• The 6-pack (pdf)
• The 4-pack (pdf)
• The Can (pdf)

Last of all I need to thank a ton of people for the brilliant work they’ve done before me. That includes: Leah and Brandon from Adaptive Path and apirak for his Omnigraffle Mac OS X Sketch Stencils.