When I upgraded to Outlook 2003 a while back, one thing that took a little getting used to was the way in which some HTML emails were full of missing elements because
"To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of some pictures in this message".
Some emails, usually newsletters and marketing shots like the one pictured here, are so full of images as to be incomprehensible when Outlook has done this.
Insofar as it is possible to notice one's unconscious actions, I catch myself -
- Checking who the email sender, which I seem to do with all emails as part of deciding how important they are and whether they might be spam.
- Not checking the title (probably from (1) I know it is not likely to be especially interesting.
- Visually scanning the email briefly in Outlook's preview window before deleting it.
So emails like the featured one certainly don't work for me. Ones with at least one paragraph of prominent text are going to work better, because I might read something of interest in my scan (the next image from the Online Publisher's Association) is a more successful design to get my attention. You can see that they have put a list of clickable news items that I can read, even though Outlook has nuked all the images.
The third email (from Boots, a well know chain of chemist shops in the UK) also does better - reasonably prominent paragraph of text addressed to me in the middle of all the image place holders.
I say "doesn't work for me " etc. not because I am vain enough to think marketers particularly want to market to lil' old me - usability being what it is I am left wondering whether I am typical in this (my Outlook settings, my behaviour on encountering these kinds of emails and so on).
But if I were working on email newsletters, I probably would want to try looking at drafts with all the images nuked: it can be more disturbing than you might think.
