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Three Human Interface Hypotheses Update: Email is Efail
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- 2/19 11:59 PM
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A year ago I published Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design which in short provided some analysis that demonstrated that the simpler and faster a user interface is, the easier it is to use. The response has been quite amazing, with over a hundred blog posts and comments across various sites (Digg, Reddit etc.)
I was particularly humbled that Ev Williams incorporated a summary of the three hypotheses in a few of his talks last year: Web 2.0 Summit (referencing slide) and LeWeb 3 conference (see video discussion starting at 6:00). Ev is the rare "serial entrepreneur" that can be proud of that label, having successfully founded and sold two innovative ground-breaking companies (Blogger, Odeo) and now working on Twitter, a feat far more impressive than a few hypotheses in a blog post.
Last year when I posted The Three Hypotheses, they very much helped me explain why I was finding email so much less useful/usable than instant messaging (IM) and Twitter. Since then, I have found that while I can keep up with more people contacting me over IM and following more people on Twitter, email has simply become less and less usable, but not for reasons of interface, as I'm using the email application now as I was a year ago.
I'm probably responding to less than 1 in 10 emails that are sent directly to me, even fewer of those that are sent to a set of people or a list. The usability of email for me has deteriorated so much that I exclaimed on Twitter recently: EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL.
I think there are a number of factors why email is failing for me while other communication methods such as IM and Twitter are scaling. However, I think two specific reasons in combination account for most of the problem.
1. Point to point communications do not scale.
All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of "To" in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually "working" on any thing in particular (next-actions or projects, e.g. coding, authoring, drawing, enjoying your life etc.) and will thus experience a productivity failure. The obvious solution is to push as much 1:1 communication into 1:many or 1:all forms such as public blogs and wikis. My CommunicationProtocols wiki page describes this preference.
However, while 1:1 email is not scaling for me, I feel like 1:1 IM is scaling which would seem to refute the above reasoning. There are two reasons why this is not so:
- You are only busy with instant messages (IMs) from people when you are active in your IM client. People can only send you IMs when you choose to be online, rather than whenever they choose to do so. This gives you much tighter control over both how much and when you IM, as opposed to email which continuously piles up whether you are online or not.
- Perhaps IM simply has a higher scaling limit than email. That is, per the three hypotheses, since IM is much more usable than email, perhaps there is a factor of 10 or more in terms of the number of IMs you can receive and respond to as compared to email. In otherwords, perhaps IM also has a 1:1 scaling limit, but just one that I haven't encountered yet.
The second reason that I think email is becoming a worse and worse problem is directly due to its higher usability barrier, that is:
2. Emails tend to be bloated with too many details and different topics.
Email requires more of an interface cognitive load tax than IM (as compared to the time spent on writing the content itself), thus people naturally put much more into an email (perhaps in an unconscious effort to amortize that interface tax overhead across more content). People may feel that since they are already "bothering" to write an email, that they might as well take the time to go into all kinds of detail, and perhaps even add a few more things that they're thinking about it. Such natural message bloat places additional load on the recipient, both in terms of the raw length of the message, and in terms of the depth and variety of topics covered in the email. This results in a direct increase in processing time per email thus making it even harder for people to take the necessary time to process and respond. I know I've left numerous emails grow stale because there were simply too many different things in the email that required a response, and I didn't want to send a response without responding to everything in the email because then I would inevitably receive yet another email response without being able to file the original as being processed and thus have the situation worsen!
I don't have answers to all of these problems. I do have some suggestions that appear to be helping, though I'm far from solving the larger problem of scaling communications in general.
- Publish how you prefer to be contacted. E.g. here are my preferred communication protocols.
- Move as much 1:1 communication into 1:many or 1:all mediums. Rather than email or IM someone specifically (even in response), push yourself to publish things publicly somewhere with a permalink (wiki, blog, twitter). This does two things:
- It increases the chance that someone else that might have asked you the same question may find your answer on the Web, and thus avoid a 1:1 contact.
- For those that don't find it and ask you the same question anyway, it provides a URL for you to quickly send to them in a reply.
- Reduce your use of email as much as possible. This is definitely a work in progress for me. See my Email Reduction project for what I've done, and am doing to puruse this goal, as well as references to others' work in this area.
- EMAIL is EFAIL. Pass it on. There is a strong cultural bias among technology workers (and perhaps most tech companies, at least from my experience, e.g. Microsoft folks love email) to use email as the default solution for all communication, whether 1:1, signing up for services, or registering to leave a comment on a blog. Most of the signup/registration cases can be (and are being) replaced with URL based solutions like OpenID and hCard profiles. But we must actively fight this cultural bias for email. Yes, we have to tell people that they are wrong, that their cherished communication tool is inefficient and does not scale. We have to stand firm and let emails die or at best respond to them slowly, letting urgent matters find us via other preferred methods of communication. People will learn and adapt.
- Remember there are worse things than email. Long before email failed to scale as a communication medium, other methods failed first (exceptions in parentheses). Faxes (legal matters only). Printed letters (handwritten letters still have value). Phone calls (limit them to: close friends, family, and last minute event coordination only), and of course voicemails (don't bother, send a text message instead).
- For more see: EmailEfail Wiki: Articles, Misconceptions, and Follow-ups
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