Is it time we put an end to “e-mail”?
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awful email gif
I need a new dicationary. The one I’ve got is pretty good, but I don’t like to have a dictionary that’s too old. Language moves on too quickly. I did take a look at one dictionary, Collins, which calls itself modern. However, whatever its virtues, I will not be able to purchase the volume. The reason is that it fails the email test. The entry for this word states e-mail (or email).
It is email. Not e-mail. Simple as.
How on earth did we start using e-mail in the first place? e, of course, is short for electronic. So e-mail is short for electronic-mail. But as electronic is a single adjective in front of the noun mail, the hyphen is inappropriate. e is a contraction of electronic, so email should have been written e’ mail. And like o’clock and can’t, the space can be removed to make e’mail. But either through ignorance, a desire to appear cool or modern, or technological limitations in implementing the apostrophe, we ended up with e-mail.
There might have been a case to include the hyphen if there was any kind of amiguity of the meaning of email. But there isn’t. If I write the word email out of context, are you in any doubt as to its meaning? Of course not. Now, is email a type of mail, or an entity in its own right? Compare with website, this is now a single unhyphenated entity and no longer a type of site, which would have made it a web-site. Email, too, has become an entity. Therefore, the correct spelling is email.
For anyone who claims that e-mail is the correct term, or eMail for that matter, I urge you to consider your grasp of grammar and your elements of style (do not be cool).
Do you agree that it is time to kill off e-mail, or is there a grammatical nuance which my argument has bypassed?
Are there any other words which require such clarification?
What is your favourite usability book?
Comments(0)Wonderline gives a usability reading list on IA/UI/UX. I thought there were some missing. But I kept scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling. There are so many of them. One day, I’ll write a list of books, but in the meantime, here are my current favourites:
- The Elements of Style: This classic by Strunk & White written 100 years ago is actually about how to write. It give simple advice on writing. It is opinionated and incomplete. A pleasure - and fun - to read.
- Don’t Make Me Think (2nd edition) - the classic usability coffee table book by Krug, with the best script for conducting a usability test which I have come across so far.
- Blueprints for the Web - Wodtke usbaility classic which prompted me to do more with wireframes and blueprints.
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd Edition) - the findability classic. Perhaps more detailed than it strictly needs to be. If you want comprehensive, this is it. If you want corporate, this is it.
- SEO for Dummies (3rd edition) by Kent - covers all the main elements of SEO - I want to get hold of Professional SEO too.
- Analytics - something else I plan to study more.
- Accessibility - do you have any suggestions? - everything I have learnt has been on the job or at conferences. I’m interested in measuring whether or not a site is accessible. I’ll leave the standards based design and hacks to the designers.
What is your favourite usability book and why?
What does a Content Strategist do and what are their deliverables?
Comments(1)This question on content strategy was recently pos(t)ed on an email list, with a link to an article called Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data on Boxes and Arrows. Having written a content strategy, I felt the urge to respond on strategy writing as follows:
- A strategy is just another word for a plan
- The strategy could be: what we can do with the resources we’ve got; what we could do if we invested in this thing, or more likely both
- A strategy should include the who, what, where, when, how, and why.
- The strategy should include the following four elements:
1. what does the business want to achieve
2. what resources does the business have to achieve it (infrastructure, staff, finances etc)
3. what are the user needs, and
4. what content / services are available and who is going to manage the content.
- The strategy has to be used - will the strategy make a difference, and if so, how
Having written a content strategy which was left unfinished and is gathering dust, I would focus on the last question first and make sure the people at the top are engaged in this (you don’t write a strategy in order to get the top involved, you write a strategy because the top are involved)
Also, don’t fall for the old ‘how can we have a content strategy when there isn’t a business strategy’ routine. There is a symbiotic relationship between the two, so both can inform each other.
Jay Fienberg from Juxtaprose gave an excellent response on the content strategy role and content strategy deliverables (reprinted with permission):
A Content Strategist is person who paints a cohesive, usually far-reaching, compelling picture of what an organization’s content is and can be, how that content comes into being, and what are its key values to the organization, to clients / customers, to the world, etc.
A “Content Strategy” deliverable is a kind-of plan, but it’s more about a strategic path of development (across multiple projects / multiple time spans) than a specific project / time span.
A “Content Plan” would be more specifically at the project level– including who exactly does what, and how they do it. And, typically, the lead role for implementing a content plan would be the “Content Manager.” A good content strategy would provide a path that can span across multiple content plans.
A content strategist can be the person who creates a content plan, and/or can also wear the hat of content manager. But, in bigger projects, there can be separate individuals doing the content strategy and content management roles, and they’d likely collaborate on some or all of the content plans.
What are your thoughts on content strategy, content strategists, and associated deliverables?
Btw, notice how the original questionner demonstrates a good use of non-sexist pronouns - it is more important to write respectully than to respect archaic rules of grammar!
Do you really want Geode to know where you are?
I don’t
Geode, the Mozilla goe-tagging project, has been announced. This will use mobile, wi-fi and user-input technologies to tell a website where you are and offer appropriate content. This all reminds me of a terrifying book I read a year or so ago called Ambient Findability by Peter Morville. Peter Morville was co-author of Information Architeture for the World Wide Web. This book is a tremendous resource for findability. However, the book Ambient Findability has nothing to do with Findability. Findability is the ability of a user to find content after arriving at a website. Ambient Findability is the ability of the internet to know where you are at any moment in time.
So what is the point of all this? What great benefit does this happen to the user? Apparently, if I hit a new town, I can take out my laptop, and it will tell me where there’s a cafe nearby.
Am I missing something here? Why not just ask someone? Would you reveal your location to a website just to find a cafe in a new town?
How do you raise the profile of your URL?
I was watching the briefing by Gordon Brown earlier. I noticed that on the front of the two lecturns was some writing. I assumed that one said Prime Minister and the other Chancellor. But no, not at all. What they actually said were the identical same words: number10.gov.uk. So I duly typed this into my Firefox address bar. Took a scout around. Noticed the flickr, YouTube and twitter feeds. Thought (very briefly) about whether to add number10 as a friend.
Hey, hold on a minute. If I link to this site, it’s going to help their SEO. The sites going to move up from No. 3 on Google to No. 1. (Interesting that telegraph.co.uk is No. 1 - they are hardly going to be his No. 1 fan - shows that SEO isn’t just about being nice - a search on Yahoo for miserable failure currently returns www.whitehouse.gov/president as the top result - and if you’re reading this after November 2008, the president is currently George W. Bush - The Mighty Bush).
So, the financial crisis has helped with SEO of number10.gov.uk. What interesting and bizarre offline campaigns are you running to raise the profile of your domain name?
Why do you Ask?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7646579.stm
I checked out the site using HideMyAss, as it’s available in the US, but not here in the UK until 20 November. Its target audience is my age range (35 to 55) and they don’t care about 20 year-olds, which is refreshing. So does it work? Well, I daresay they’re not really aiming at techies like myself, but I typed in usability blog to see what came up. On the right column, there are related searches. That caught my eye. In the list were: Definition of Usability, Usability Testing, Web Usability, Define Usability Testing, Usability Factors, Web Design Usability, Why Is Usability Important, Human Computer Interaction, Hci, Heuristic Evaluation, Accessibility, Jakob Nielsen. From an information architecture point of view, this could encourage people to think more about related searches to improve the findability of content. Not only that, but this could be a quick and dirty (and cheap) keyword generator. I’d be interested to know who uses ask and why. I don’t know anyone who does, buy that could either be the circles I move in, or maybe it’s something people only do in the privacy of their own home. Write and share your comments.
Serial Killers and Information Seeking Behaviour
At my talk on Information Architecture last year, I described how the foraging behaviour of bees could help us to understand how users find information. It seems that the same technique is now being used to help find serial killers. Bees join hunt for serial killers. I need to think further about the fact that bees do not seek nectar which is to hand, and how this might help building the user experience.
Gmail 502 Error
My Google Mail stopped working. I clicked on the link ‘I cannot access my account’. I followed the instructions. And shortly afterwards, my account has come back to life. It’s free. It’s got imap. But do I want to leave my mission critical stuff on there? Possibly, because I leave my originals on the ISP server. But that means I have to manage the ISP email, as space is pretty limited. I could pay for a hosted Exchange service. But who’s to say that it would cause less problems? So, I download the emails to my desktop, back that up, and put the backup in a fireproof box. A lot of work. But I’ve seen too many people in tears who’ve lost their work.
Findability, SEO, and Web Standards
Interesting looking book coming out soon on web standards and findability. We design with web standards at the University of Salford, and our search engine results seem pretty good for both the Staff Channel and the Student Channel.
Gmail, Fung Shui and Danger
The main reason I wanted to get a Pocket PC was to make it easier to manage my emails. Apart from wanting to be able to send and receive emails on the move, I also wanted to make it easier at home. I really don’t want to have to kick off my computer at home just to see if I’ve got an email. For example, I am a trustee at Lancaster Steiner School, and someone might email me to take a look at a policy document. I just want to know the email is there, and I can work out whether to deal with it now or later. And in many cases, I would look to reply without even using the computer.
I also commute about an hour each way to the University of Salford, where I am the Web Content Architect. Perhaps I could use some of that time to deal with emails, so that when I get home, I can get straight into family time without thinkging, ‘hmm, I wonder if there’s any emails waiting for me’.
So having settled on a Pocket PC, now it’s time to configure it. In the past, I’ve used POP3, and it’s been rather unsatisfactory. I don’t want to download emails on my phone, deal with them, and then have the same email on the server or at home. I want to send emails without having to BCC myself to keep a copy. I like the way in Outlook, I get all my emails in one in box, and I can choose which account to reply from. It keeps them all together nicely. Disastrously, Outlook Mobile seems to allow one Outlook or Exchange account, and about six POP3/IMAP accounts. It doesn’t seem to have the ability to choose which account to send from. Cue head-scratching, frustration and confusion.
While my subconscious is dealing with this, I get an with an email address for my blogging domain. The reason I want this is because I’m a member of the Information Architecture Institute, and I want to ake part in email discussions using a professional email address: one that is neither my personal address nor my work address. The way this is done is by setting up a subdomain for the blog so that the main domain can be used for the mail server. As my ISP doesn’t provide something like CPANEL, then it would require a support call, which is a bit tedious. For all my faults, however, I do have an attribute which comes in very handy as an information architect. Insatiable curiosity. So although I’ve investigated the problem before and identified the only solution, I couldn’t help myself having another scout around WordPress. I looked at the faqs, the forums and the dashboard, repeating the process that I had undertaken some months ago which pointed me to the subdomain solution.
Hold on a minute. What’s this new link in the Domain’s tab? Email! And a link to Enable Google MX. Whatever that means.
So, a bit more investigation, and it seems that WordPress now supports email through Google Apps. What’s that? Seems to be a web-based domain-specific free exchange-type service. Perfect. So I set up my email through Google Apps, and notice that Google now supports IMAP. Nice one. So, the first message of this post is - don’t assume you know the answer, especially if you’ve investigated the problem before.
All I need to do now is work out how to get all my emails coming into one in box and to be able to send from different accounts. I hate to think about how much time I spent trying to crack this one. Before I set up my professional email address, I had two email addresses coming into a Google Mail account, and I could click the ‘change’ link to set which account the email was being sent from. But this option is conspicously lacking in Mobile Outlook, Google Mail for Mobile, and the Google Mail Java application. Looking round the forums, other people seem to be having the same problem. However, best is the enemy of good. It’s more efficient and effective to create a good enough solution and move on to the next project. I also want more of a judo approach. If something appears too difficult, then instead of fighting it, see where the force is taking you - it may be something better than what you had intended. So rather than a Canutean struggle to make my email work how I wanted to work, I attempted to configure within the apparent limitations. I set up one Gmail account for each POP3 account I have. One for personal use, one for orders and registrations, and my professional account on Google Apps. Now, even though my ISP only provides POP3 accounts, I have IMAP accounts for all my emails. Wonderful. The only downside is that they are all in separate mailboxes.
But then something intersting begins to happen. As I move things around to their correct email, I find that it actually works. I thought the limitations of the software was stopping me from working the way I wanted to work. How wrong I was. In fact, the limitations opened my eyes to a better way of working. This is for the same reason as Feng Shui has helped at home. Because part of applying Feng Shui is to compartmentalise or zone different areas of the house and to limit the purpose of each space. And in the same way, by having one IMAP account for each type of email address, I can zone my time to deal with one category of email at a time. And because the Pocket PC shows me new messages from each account, it’s easy to choose whether to check them or not and to deal with them a block at a time. So, as well as being open-minded and curious, we have the second lesson of this post: Compartmentalise your time. This hour is for this, and during this hour, I will do nothing but this. As I write this post, this hour is for writing a post.
As I was setting up the Gmail accounts, I kept getting locked out. This seems to have stopped happening now. It may be because I had multimple accounts open in different windows or something like that. So I am keeping copies of my emails on my ISP POP3 account, in my home desktop pst files etc so that I can back them up and have access to them whatever happens to Google Mail. So we have the usual Web 2.0 third party concerns. Let’s face it, if I get locked out of my Google account, my only option would be to try and open a new one and start again. There is a premier edition of Google Apps for $50 per user account per year which offers ‘24/7 assistance’. And if Google lose all my emails, there’s probably something in the T&Cs which absolves them of all responsibility. We’re really relying on them wanting to maintain credibility, which given recent statements about how they don’t see the problem with sharing out data leads to another concern. What are they doing with the data, and what might they do with it in the future. In reality, this is an issue with any ISP. However, if my workplace were to misuse data, I can go in there and do something about it. And if my ISP were to misuse my data, it would be easier to deal with them through the courts, as they are UK-based. So, for now, I’ll continue to use Google Apps and Google Mail. In the case of my professional email address, I don’t have much choice unless WordPress offer alternatives to Google Mail or I move to another blog host. But now I know better what it is I need from my email service providers, it will be easier to find a UK-based supplier to fulfil my needs. Financially, of course, it’s fantastic. It has saved me renting an Exchange box, which would cost about ?10 per month.
And so to my final point. Although you need an idea of where you are going, it is better to move in vaguely the right direction than to not move at all. I might have planned setting up my email perfectly before I even got my Pocket PC. I could have specified a supreme plan of action. And it would not have given me the best result. But this point is more complex than it first appears. There are cases where excellent planning can lead to a quicker solution. This seems to me to be the topic of another post. But if you have any thoughts on if, when and how projects should be meticulously planned, then please add your comments to help me with my future post on planning.
