…for email newsletter usability, that is.
SDG here. In my day job, which is Web development, usability occupies a significant part of my focus and energy. It began with a seminar at a computer conference a number of years ago, after which I gave a couple of presentations at the company I work for, and before I knew it I had become the usability guy in my Web development department.
So one of the things I do is periodically comb through the biweekly “AlertBox” column of usability guru Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen is full of helpful tips and perspectives, and is famous for saying such things as “Users spend most of their time on OTHER sites” and “Zero learning curve or death.”
Anyway, I was interested and amused to see in his last column an analysis of the usability of the official email newsletters of the Bush and Kerry campaigns. Nielsen gives low scores to both services, with Bush scoring particularly low in “subscription maintenance and unsubscribing” and Kerry weaker in “subscription interface” and “newsletter content and presentation.” In the end, though, Bush comes out ahead by a single point, with a 58% score over Kerry’s 57%.
On newsletter content, Nielsen finds that Bush’s content is mostly “positive campaigning” and “announcements and instructions,” while Kerry’s is mostly “negative campaigning” and appeals for readers to “volunteer and donate.”
On the battle for inbox attention and differentiation from spam, Nielsen writes:
Subject lines were universally lame, with Kerry having the most user-repellant subjects, like “Tonight,” “Don’t stop now,” and “Deadline almost here.” Why would anybody think that those messages were anything but spam? Bush had somewhat better subject lines, like “Kerry’s Flip Flop Olympics,” and “Participate in W ROCKS in Alameda County,” though he also had content-free subjects like “Brace Yourselves.”
Interestingly, Kerry has something like twice as many subscribers as Bush.
Finally, Nielsen closes with what I assume is an at least partly tongue-in-cheek warning to candidates who ignore his recommendations at their own peril:
In 1996, I wrote a review for The New York Times on the campaign websites for Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. I concluded that the two sites scored about even in usability, and I provided several recommendations for improving each site. Two weeks after the article ran, Clinton’s site had been updated to incorporate all of my recommendations. In contrast, Dole’s site stayed the same throughout the campaign. We all know who won the 1996 election, so maybe this example will motivate the campaigns to pay closer attention to usability this time around.
