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Number
13: July 30, 2003
Please forward this newsletter to your colleagues and friends. If someone
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This week in Katydid:
White
House Usability
If you want to participate in your government, you can go straight to
the top. To write directly to your President, send e-mail to president@whitehouse.gov.
Just don't expect a reply because there's no guarantee anyone will check
that mail anymore.
It seems that spam has affected even our nation's leader, and his
staff now requires that you fill
out a form in order to make sure your message gets the proper
attention. You reach the form from the contact
page of whitehouse.gov.
A recent New
York Times article covered the details. In the article, Jakob
Nielsen, web usability pundit,
was quoted as saying, "Overall it's a very cumbersome
process." After receiving this kind of criticism, the designers
updated the site a week later to include the President's e-mail again.
Call me a traitor to usability, but I expect to leap a few hurdles if
I want to communicate with my President. While I firmly believe that
government should be transparent, I also don't want the President's
staff bogged down with the kind of spam I get, or the crackpots I
encounter on the internet. I feel they should use some filters if only
to prioritize a response.
I checked out the process and learned something new right out of the
gate. I had no idea that you could request a greeting from the President
to commemorate a personal birthday, anniversary, or wedding. More
valuable to me would be a greeting on the occasion of my missing
an important anniversary in the form of a Presidential pardon. I'll
check that out another time.
The contact process has several steps:
- An information page
- Categorize your response
- Provide contact info
- Compose your message
- Confirm your message
The biggest criticism of the process is the categorization of your
message. It does give one pause to have to mark whether your comment is
supportive of or differs with the President's position. It may be quite
possible that one could do both.
The categories are an information architecture nightmare. While I
can't imagine that they could create a system that would provide a
category for every conceivable remark an American citizen might provide,
I can also imagine the frustration of those who cannot find a proper
category. The designers probably wanted to avoid all messages going into
a miscellaneous category, which most people would use as a default
rather than try to figure out the categories. As one solution, the
designers could have allowed the selection of multiple categories, or
they could have included miscellaneous sub-categories under each main
category.
Otherwise, the process is easy to use and comparable to the kind of
forms you might fill out for corporate service requests. For the White
House staff it probably cuts down on impulsive correspondence and spam.
It also makes sure that the correspondent takes accountability for their
message. E-mail verification goes to your in-box to verify your address
once you post your message. This prevents others from submitting
messages on your behalf, or from bogus accounts.
My first attempt to contact the white house came earlier this year,
when my daughter decided to write to the President. It's interesting to
note that on the White
House Kids contact page, they do not force children to use a form to
e-mail the President, although they do request that you fax your
children's letters rather than mailing them. My daughter couldn't
understand that. She sat down and wrote a letter the old-fashioned way,
and we mailed it together.
Top »
Drafting
off Viral E-mails
In many racing sports such as cycling, track, and swimming
there's a technique called drafting where you hang back behind the
leader to conserve your energy in order to try to take the lead later. I
came across an interesting variation on that theme using e-mail
marketing.
No doubt, you've seen every e-mail joke, anecdote, or dire warning
about three times now. Most of the warnings and stories are hoaxes.
These things go around endlessly. It's easy enough to check out their
validity. (Snopes
or CIAC
are good resources.) When I catch a hoax, I usually send a private,
politely worded message to the sender with the reference. However, one
that came my way was not only true, it was an awareness vehicle.
The e-mail described an exchange between a Michigan resident named
Ryan DeVries and the State Department of Environmental Quality. The
State requested that Mr. DeVries remove some debris dams from his lake
property. The dams turned out to be the work of beavers and Mr. DeVries'
reply is quite funny. Read
the entire exchange as well as the background for the story, in the
article on the Snopes web site.
The version of the message I received from my Dad had all the
hallmarks of an e-mail that's been passed around many times. They're
like a package arrived from overseas, bent, abraded, torn, and patched.
The e-mail had the familiar ">" marks and uneven line
breaks. However, the content was remarkably preserved. Like many of
these forwarded e-mails, the message included a signature. Since the
signature line directly below the content is usually the original
sender, I thought I'd check it out.
The signature belonged to Randy Finch and his URL was iceguru.com.
I went to the web site to see if they had any mention of the story. I
learned that Randy Finch is a world-renowned ice sculptor based in
Michigan, he has written a book on the subject, and the media often call
upon him to discuss his work. (You should see his wedding
cake that has a rose in a crystal ball of sculpted ice.) He does
marvelous work in color and is able to reproduce
corporate logos. He can even ship smaller versions out of state for
conventions and events. All this I learned while browsing for
information about beaver dams.
Since Randy lives in Michigan where the story takes place, I thought
he might have more information, so I contacted him directly by e-mail. I
was also sure that I was not the only person to wander onto his web site
after receiving this story. I asked him if he had seen any increase in
business because of the e-mail.
He responded, "[I] wondered if attaching our web address to an
e-mail that was certain to get circulated heavily would create traffic
on our site. It obviously has. We have received other e-mails wondering
if the story is true and our web site hits have increased about 5% on
the average since we sent it out."
All he did was send to his friends a message he found amusing. In
classic, viral marketing, they passed his message on to their friends,
leaving his contact info intact. There's no telling how much new
business he's received because he can't track the campaign, and there's
no way to calculate the ROI because dividing by zero is undefined;
however, he has certainly benefited from increased traffic.
What did he do right? Attaching his name was a no-brainer. Pundits
have advised people to include signature lines on e-mails for some time.
The key is that he chose an amusing story fit for a general audience. He
had a personal (if remote) connection to the story as it took place in
his home state. Most importantly, he chose a story that was true. These
are all positive associations with his brand.
Top »
Thanks for Reading
This e-mail newsletter spreads mainly by word of
mouth. Please forward it to your colleagues and friends. Also, you can
read other back issues.
If you have suggestions of web sites to review, writing that buzzes,
or a new way of looking at things, let me know. Send your suggestions to
.
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please let us know.
Kind regards,
Kevin Troy Darling
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