UK general election email newsletters rated

Jakob Nielsen, the usability experts’ usability expert, has an interesting post reviewing the general election emails from the main parties.

It’s a good piece – and you can read his own words here. Rather than repeat here all the good points he makes, here are some (small) caveats to it:

• He writes, “It’s not enough to have a full privacy policy elsewhere on the site. Users need to be told the policy on the spot when you ask for sensitive info”, saying that having a link to a full privacy policy from the spot where you ask for sensitive information isn’t enough. That’s a debatable point: do you really need to provide all the information at that point rather than saying “Click here for full details”, especially given the detail that “all” information requires given the range of UK law? It also rather runs counter to the idea that sign up forms should be as simple and clean as possible.
• The comments about how quickly emails were sent look to be based on a very small sample of tests. Given that email is a somewhat variable medium and sending times will vary from email to email, there’s a risk then that you end up drawing conclusions based on an atypical individual experience. A good example of that recently was a different email review which concluded that the Liberal Democrats did not send out any emails – but was based on just one attempt to sign up to an email list (which clearly didn’t work). Categorising a whole activity based on just one individual test can be very misleading – as it was in that case as I am on the email list the organisation tested and know that I received regular emails. Indeed, Nielsen’s review almost complains that the Lib Dems send out too many emails!
• The review assumes that the right frequency of campaign emails is the same for the US and the UK. Yet the US and UK vary in many ways, including internet habits. Forwarding political emails to friends is, across the board, much less common in the UK than the US. The pattern of sources of political news is very different in the two countries (the UK has national newspapers with detailed political news and it has the BBC; the US has neither). And so on. So perhaps the best pattern is the same; but quite possibly not. Evidence is needed to sustain such a point.

But as I said at the start, these are small caveats to what is a really good review.