Category Archive: Email usability tips
Is your baby’s button ugly?
Another way effective email design can make your campaigns more effective: Get all your buttons to look just right.
I know the feeling. You’ve crafted what feels like the perfect email. The photo totally complements the concise and appealing description of your new service. The label for your call to action is clear. You just know people are going to click it and take that next step. Everything’s ready. You take a deep breath, and send your baby out into the world. You’ve worked hard, and you’re proud of that baby of yours. You wait for good things. And you wait. And you wait some more. But nothing happens.
What went wrong? Why aren’t people clicking your call to action? Well, it’s time to get honest with yourself. Your baby’s button may be ugly. The label is fine. But that button design isn’t going to win her any ribbons at the county fair. You see, that button doesn’t have enough perceived affordances. Don Norman is credited with introducing this term to the design world, and it refers to “those action possibilities that are readily perceivable by an actor.” In other words, there are certain qualities of an object, in your case a button, that help people understand what they can do with it.
Let’s take a closer look at a button. Maybe you’re creating a campaign to announce your new lunch menu (because your new paninis are quite tasty). Besides showcasing a great photo of said panini, you really want your customers to click that button so they can check out the new menu on your website.
The first question to ask yourself is whether it looks like a button. Not really. It looks more like a rectangle with a border. Second question, does it look clickable? Maybe. It’s pretty flat, but it is different than the photo and the text. Of course, no one wants to settle for maybe – fortunately, it’s easy to add perceived affordances and make that button more effective.
This revised button looks more clickable than the old one. (The fancier way of saying this is that it demonstrates a higher level of affordance.) I know it’s tempting to be totally unique from a design perspective — and you can be if you keep affordance in mind — but it’s often more effective to use a design convention that’s already out there instead of dreaming up something new.
Sure, your button might look similar to another one, but who cares? Your audience members know that it’s a button, and they know what usually happens when they click one. They don’t have to figure that out. It’s one less thing for them to think about. Using a button with more affordance eliminates a barrier. And let’s face it, you’re competing with a lot of other noise out there (digital and physical). Why not help your subscribers get to your content – and to those delicious paninis – more easily?
What Leonardo da Vinci knew about your email campaigns
How knowing about the eye’s Foveal viewport may change the way you look at your next campaign.
At Emma, we’re always thinking about audiences and the important role design plays in communicating your message. We also do a lot of thinking about the concepts behind the why. Why is one campaign more effective than another? Why do some links get clicked more?
We often talk about reasons like headlines and timeliness, but here’s another concept you might want to be consider: the Foveal viewport. The fovea is the part of the eye that makes it possible for us to have 100-percent visual acuity. So what the heck does that mean? Well, when we look at something, we see only a small area of it in complete focus. We may think we see the whole picture clearly, but we don’t. Leonardo da Vinci was actually the first person to discover this issue with sight lines. Elements that fall outside this area get blurry – they get blurry quite fast, actually. As our eyes move, or to use a fancier term saccade, this area of complete focus moves as well. This area of complete focus is called the Foveal viewport.
For example, when we look at this web page, we may think we see the whole page in focus:
You think you see it, right?
But here’s our reality, with only the Foveal viewport in complete focus:
What you actually see, through the Foveal viewport.
Another way to see the size of this is to hold your thumbs up next to each other — the area of your two thumbnails is roughly the same size as the Foveal viewport.
So how can you apply this to email design?
+ You can place your most important content where your audience is most likely to see it when they first open your campaign.
+ You can place pieces of related content in close proximity to each other.
+ Since the Foveal viewport moves as a person looks at something (and our eyes look for things that stand out), you can place any calls to action as close as you can to the related content.
Let’s say you’re creating a campaign with an announcement about your new deli lunch menu.
How's the lunch promo look?
Not bad. Appealing photo along with hunger- and thirst-inducing copy. (Excuse me while I go grab a pop.) Ah. Now, let’s take a look at the Foveal viewport.
Lunch, as your fovea sees it.
Your first thought might be that the viewport will move, so no worries (that’s what I thought too). But it’s been shown that people often don’t even see items that fall outside the viewport. So what if you shortened the copy a bit to get that button closer?
Proximity ... yum.
Much better. Besides the copy being easier to scan, the button you want people to click on now falls within the same Foveal viewport. Pretty cool.
It’s also worth noting that too much focusing between saccades can cause fatigue. This refocusing happens hundreds of times every minute without us even knowing it, but the effort adds up, so you might want to avoid making your audience work so hard when they’re reading. Because let’s face it – do you really want your audience to feel tired after they read your emails?
Here’s what you can do:
+ You can minimize the amount of content you’re asking people to look at.
+ You can minimize the amount of content you’re asking people to decide between.
+ You can be sure your email templates aren’t too wide.
Knowing what Leonardo da Vinci knew about how eyeballs work just might change the way you look at your next campaign. With a few tweaks to your designs, you can help your audience see things the way you want them to see them.
Editor’s note: This post launches a new series from Emma’s UX team – they’ll be sharing ideas, tips and expertise about email usability (and perhaps occasionally mentioning medieval geniuses).
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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