Month: July 2012

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Yahoo – asking the wrong questions about its future

From a comment by the new CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer:

Ms. Mayer may have the hardest time taking Yahoo into the mobile advertising arena, a market dominated by her former employer. Unlike Yahoo, Google and Apple dominate the mobile advertising space with hardware and software options.

And that’s where it runs headlong into its identity problem. “Yahoo is still mainly a media company. It doesn’t have an operating system. It doesn’t have the devices,” Mr. Hallerman, of eMarketer, said. “I don’t know if there’s room in the market for a fourth mobile platform.”

Asked whether she plans to run Yahoo as a media company or a technology company, Ms. Mayer said, “It’s not the right question. The most important thing is to give end users something valuable, inspiring and delightful that makes them want to come to Yahoo every day.”

Marissa Mayer is just 37 years old and has uncommon wisdom among the tech analysts and elite. Best of success to her!

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Comment philosophy on Tumblr

From an interview with David Karp, founder of the Tumblr blog network, I want to highlight a concept where design shapes behavior:

Karp’s thinking about the comments section, which is generally assumed to be a core blog feature, helps illustrate his broader ideas about how design shapes behavior online. Typically, a YouTube video or blog post or article on a newspaper’s site is the dominant object, with comments strewed below it, buried like so much garbage. Thus many commenters feel they must scream to be noticed, and do so in all caps, profanely and with maximum hyperbole. This, Karp argues, brings out the worst in people, so Tumblr’s design does not include a comments section.

How, then, to encourage feedback while discouraging drive-by hecklers who make you never want to post again? First, Karp notes, you can comment on someone else’s post, by reblogging it and adding your reaction. But that reaction appears on your Tumblr, not the one you’re commenting on. “So if you’re going to be a jerk, you’re looking like a jerk in your own space, and my space is still pristine,” Karp explains. This makes for a thoughtful network and encourages expression and, ultimately, creativity. “That’s how you can design to make a community more positive.”

While the imagined rationale for commenters acting poorly because they can’t be noticed easily is a weak cause-and-effect, I find the design response innovative and appealing:

Your readers’ comments are shown on their blog, not yours, thus keeping your blog more positive.

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Making rich graphical emails from your desktop email program

A client recently asked about placing graphics into an email template — namely, background graphics.

Email programs (Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird) are not designed to easily create rich graphical HTML emails. They make it difficult to embed background images (for mastheads, say); they vary in their support and tools for styling CSS, and there are greatly varying display abilities of email platforms across the internet.

HTML emails need to be designed as simple as possible — no backgrounds, complex CSS, floats, etc. since there are 100+ different email readers/webmail systems [hotmail, gmail, yahoo, aol, cpanel webmail, etc.] with varying levels of support. In all, your emails’  html and css must be very simple to be cross-platform.

All the fancy emails you and I get (from Amazon to Gap to Starbucks to NatGeo) are sent by dedicated email publishing systems… carefully constructed to let the sender add design elements to the templates that will work on most email platforms.

The client, if its needs are growing for rich graphical emails, needs to use a 3rd party tool like Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp, or build its own email publisher tool.

These types of emails are useful for communicating with their audience.  For internal emails, using Outlook can work, since all employees are likely on the same platform.

We can hack and tweak our way to success in Outlook or Entourage or Thunderbird, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

To make a template in Outlook, for example, a background image behind the title text can’t just be copy/pasted in. Outlook provides an import/place menu command to insert the image in the background.