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Usability Newsletter!
Hyperlinks
in Email
Article by John
S. Rhodes
Abstract
Email usability can be
dramatically increased or decreased by how URLs are designed and placed in
messages. An example of one problem is described in detail in this
article. Also, a couple of simple tips are provided to help you improve
the URLs in your email messages.
Background
I receive over 300 email
messages every single day. Of those messages, only about 5-15
"real" messages; the rest are spam. I am in contact with a lot
of very smart people and I generally enjoy reading email from friends and
colleagues. I also enjoy getting email from WebWord readers. Like many
other people I have subscribed to several email newsletters. As many
people know, I also send out a couple of
newsletters. So, I have experience both sending and receiving them.
Not too long ago I received
an email newsletter from Lane
Becker of Adaptive Path. I
have a lot of respect for Lane and for Adaptive Path. In general, he knows
what he is doing and has many good things to say about usability and
information architecture. However, the email that I received from Adaptive
Path disappointed me. I won't blame Lane or Adaptive Path, but I still
want to explain what went wrong in the newsletter. Let's take a look at
it...
URLs in Email Newsletters
The main problem with the
Adaptive Path newsletter is that the URLs were corrupted by my email
client. The actual problem should be shared by both Lane Becker and
Microsoft Outlook Express. If you take a look at Figure 1 below you
will see that the URLs are ruined by the trailing parentheses of the URLs.
The parentheses are added to the URLs and as you can see in Figure 2,
they do not work in the browser.
FIGURE 1
The URLs in this newsletter include
trailing parentheses and are corrupt.
FIGURE 2
The URL does not work in the browser
and causes a 404 error (Page Not Found).
Usability Tips
The good news is that this
problem is very easy to fix. There are at least two reasonable solutions.
For example, you can add a space after the opening parenthesis but before
the URLs and add a space after the URL but before the trailing parenthesis
(see Figure 3).
FIGURE 3
The URL doesn't touch the parentheses.
You can also move the URL to the next line or the end of the paragraph
(see Figure 4). This is what I do in the WebWord Addiction and the
WebWord Usability Newsletter. I can't remember any person every
complaining about this method. However, it isn't very elegant.
FIGURE 3
The URL is at the end of the paragraph
so it shouldn't corrupt the URL.
There are some other methods I have seen and used. For example, in the
past I have advocated using
angle brackets around the URL instead of parentheses but people told
me that their email clients corrupted the URLs just like parentheses do in
the Adaptive Path example.
There is more good news to
share. In Figure 2 you should notice that the Adaptive Path error
page is customized and includes several useful pieces of information.
First, they take the blame for the error so that you don't feel like a
jackass. Second, they have provided a ton of contact information. This
kind of error recovery goes a long way!
Caveat
As I said, I can't blame Adaptive
Path for all of the problems with the URLs in their newsletter. Unlike web
browser testing, it is more difficult to test how an email message will
look in various email clients. There are more email clients than web
browsers and their behavior regarding URLs is not standardized. For
example, there are entire articles on dealing
with URLs in AOL's email client. Testing URLs in email clients, and
testing email newsletters in general, is tricky business.
Comments?
Please send them to me: john@webword.com
I want to know what you think about this article.
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