

Email is not broken, we are. - ljoshua
http://www.joshualyman.com/2012/04/email-is-not-broken-we-are/

======
toast76
What ever happened to "there are no stupid users, only stupid
websites/applications"?

The user is not broken. Wanting email to be MORE than it is does not mean
users are wrong. The fact is that email does not do what the average user
wants it to do. Telling people to change their habits is...well...stupid.

Before anyone chimes in with "email isn't broken, but the clients may be".
Whether this is a client issue or protocol issue is irrelevant. 99.9% of users
do not know what SMTP is let alone why it is not broken. The email experience
is broken. End of story. No blog post required.

~~~
ljoshua
Sorry, you missed the point. Occasionally the user _is_ broken, because as
human beings we sometimes do things that are less than optimal. I'm not making
an argument really for whether or not this is a technology issue or a
client/server problem, but more to say that we should try and have slightly
more productive behaviors before we expect a technology solution to solve our
woes (often self-inflicted).

~~~
toast76
No, I didn't :)

If this was an "occasional" problem, there wouldn't have been a dozen blog
posts on HN about it in the last week (least of all this one). If humans are
doing anything sub-optimally that's something technology can help improve. The
more common the problem, the more likely there is a common solution.

If everyone wants to use email as a todo list, you have two options: 1\. tell
everyone not to 2\. build it

Option 1 will not work.

~~~
aethr
Email is not "broken".

Users are not "broken".

Email is simply a method for people to communicate. People are messy. Put two
of them together (communication) and the messiness increases exponentially.

Have you ever seen two people arguing, and then it turns out (much later) they
were arguing about two completely different things, and they are actually
agreeing with each other? This isn't a technology problem, speech isn't
"broken".

Have you ever sent a text message, and the other person didn't respond for a
few hours and you started to think that they were upset, or something you said
was wrong etc. Then it turns out their phone was turned off or they were in a
movie theatre. Everything was fine! Does this mean people are "broken"?

The argument going on in this thread is far too black and white to apply to
reality. People live in the grey area. Part of being human is managing the
messiness of interacting with other people.

~~~
ljoshua
Thanks for the grounding aethr. And toast76 brings up very good points. What I
think we've seen recently with all the related articles on HN is a dichotomy
of how we are viewing the problem. Most describe it from the perspective of
email not fulfilling our technical needs (security, threading, etc.) which is
true. There is a lot of work to be done there. I just want to help shed light
on a broader problem, where we're shoehorning email into a very difficult
problem that is brought on heavily by our own actions.

------
enginous
We should be adapting computers to work for humans, not adapting humans to
work for computers.

I agree that there are tons of improvements to be made to effective e-mail use
in organizations. But many of the behaviors we exhibit are completely natural
to us and difficult to change. For example, we check our e-mail on what
psychologists refer to as a _variable interval reinforcement schedule_ ; we
know that at approximately some interval we get an e-mail that is helpful or
enjoyable to us, and we waste our time checking for that e-mail.

It's hard to change the e-mail we receive on a global scale in one instant.
It's quite a lot easier to develop tools that change how the e-mail we receive
is displayed to us. One such concept was the Gmail priority inbox: what if you
only got notifications for the e-mail that was important and could buffer up
the rest for later?

A complete theory of how e-mail could work might easily involve a hybrid
approach. Why aren't people suggesting solutions that could work instead of
debating approaches? Does it have to be one way or the other?

~~~
ljoshua
Great comment enginous. I want to look into variable interval reinforcement
now, as I've been approaching this from more of a research-based angle.

The solutions should be hybrid, though I still believe that better behavior,
reinforced by technology, is what will be the most effective. If you have your
client reinforcing good checking schedules, that's a behavioral/technical
win/win.

~~~
enginous
That's a great point: technology can be very effective at shaping human
behavior.

You might want to check out the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab's project on
behavior design[0], which has some resources about how to use technology to
change human behavior.

[0] <http://captology.stanford.edu/projects/behaviordesign.html>

------
delinka
I've seen evidence of 'broken email authors' for many years. I'd write a
thorough email with explanations and questions and I'd get a reply answering
the first question with a single "yes" and no more content.

------
Jakob
> When using email, sending tons of short, not fully formed messages is
> killing us. We need to take the time to construct useful, productive
> messages, something most of us are not doing.

That's true. Since I began writing well-formed longer emails I receive fewer
ones and nearly no IM-style "yes.", "how about that?" anymore. It's also much
more satisfying to write and, I hope, to read.

------
CoffeeAndCoffee
Some people are using e-mail like IM and e-mail is built as an asynchronous
communication system. In my opinion, that's where the friction happens.

The author of this post brings up a great point about defining expectations on
reply times. I think it's healthy to create an auto-reply that states that you
only check e-mail x number of times a day.

~~~
cdcarter
I would find getting an auto-reply for every email I send to someone, just
telling me they won't be looking at it until later that day ~incredibly~
frustrating. I do not need that email on my phone. I do not need that email in
my box. Perhaps a rapportive like sidebar, but not as an email proper, please.

------
h4ck3rhn
My response is more tuned towards corporate/enterprise/more-than-20-person
teams.

so we got salesforce for CRM, getsatisfaction/others for support, jira for
project management, tons of enterprise minded apps, yet people resort to
email. why? its easier to just type in an email as opposed to logging in /
filling a form, and last but not the least treating notifications sent by
email in same vein as a human being.

Whats pathetic is "IT" sets up these apps and does pilot program and claims
success.

I believe more idiot-proof-apps, as easy as email client app shows up, lesser
will be "emails"

~~~
Duff
The idiot proof app is email.

Email is the digital successor to the memorandum, which is turn the apex of a
line of written communication mechanisms dating back thousands of years.

A Sumerian boss got his reports via tablet. Phahroh via papyrus. Roosevelt via
telegram. Pershing via a rolled up message tied to a bird.

Instead of futzing around with some fragile app which may or may not be
designed for what I'm doing, I can send an email to nearly anyone on earth
that I need to deal with.

------
jkmurray
Couldn't agree more. Email should be something like: "I want to know it, but I
don't need to know it right now. Otherwise I should have called you." Let's
try to get that back.

------
kenrikm
It's 2012 we have a 100mb up/down connection and yet I still can't attach a
file over 10MB and not have it bounce back. I can't believe that any self
respecting hacker does not see room for improvement in that situation. I
should not have to work around that situation (yousendit, dropbox etc..) it
should just work.

I'm firmly in the "it's broken" camp.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's 2012. We have servers/services on which we can post files/attachments,
either encrypted or access-controlled, and email links to those documents.

~~~
barik
But that's just it. Being that it's 2012, the e-mail client should be smart
enough to do this. I should be able to attach a large attachment to an e-mail
(since that's the logical place to make the association), and then, depending
on the attachment size, the e-mail client should automatically move it to
Dropbox or some other service and translate the attachment into a link for me.

The difference between the your first approach and the second is that yours
requires a behavioral change. The second approach does not. Put another way,
it is often easier to change the situation (by making it the path of least
resistance) than the person when you want someone to do something else.

It seems like some of this is already in the works, fortunately:

[http://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/15/thunderbird-to-get-
dropbox-...](http://www.ghacks.net/2012/02/15/thunderbird-to-get-dropbox-and-
file-hosting-integration/)

Maybe it already exists in certain clients (Exchange and Outlook?) and I just
haven't looked hard enough.

~~~
dredmorbius
Now ... there's a thought.

Agreed: better to put this in the client than require user behavior change.

------
plant42
Wow, someone finally gets it. The application isn't broken, the users are.

We expect too much from it, wanting it to be our todo list and other roles
that it plainly wasn't designed for.

I email doesn't do what you need or want, then find something else that does.
If you cannot, then build it and release to the world.

------
alexchamberlain
Your article failed to address the main issue: security. Off by default is
broken.

------
jodrellblank
Does anyone else feel that e-mail is not broken, but task/project management
systems are?

Fundamentally, doing "productive work" boils down multiple individual tasks
which some humans are doing, while at the same time referencing and updating
some store of information/documentation/metadata to find what to do, and say
when/how it's been done. Computers should be great at assisting with this
administration - the bicycle of the mind helps get you where you want to go.

The fact that email is used to move tasks between people, as the place to
create new tasks, as the place to discuss tasks, as the default todo-list for
a day unless you go out of your way to move information elsewhere, is all not
a failing of email or behaviour, it's a failing of project management and
shared todo list and documentation systems. They don't do it, so email does.

If you had a place where that kind of stuff was tracked /well/ it would be
trivial to use it to do all this stuff and email would fall by the wayside
because it would be less good. Email would become for personal, direct
contact, and notifications of things that you request be sent to you.

Too much work should not build up in individual inboxes, it should build up in
shared project management system - and a company can then choose to allocate
more people to it. Asking one person for information because it isn't
documented and searchable should not be the norm. Asking one person what needs
to happen next because it isn't tracked shouldn't be normal. Emailing
prototypes to your colleagues because there is no centralised storage that
works nicely shouldn't be the default.

It even seems tantalisingly easy to build - tree structured projects with
nested tasks, granular user permissions, a designed UI to answer questions
like "which bits need work", "which bits need questions answering", "which
bits are underplanned", "what should I be doing". Templates of procedures so
you can set regular patterned actions in motion.

It sort of exists. It's sort of in CRM and Sharepoint workflows, it's sort of
in individual task lists, it's sort of being made real. But not yet.

Normal cars are no good at moving lots of goods. The way to fix that is not to
make family cars with reinforced axles and tractor tyres, and it's not to
teach people to drive slower so they can balance things more carefully. It's
to invent vans and trucks and trains.

~~~
aethr
I agree with the sentiment of what (I think) you're trying to get at.

However, the problem that some people have raised is that there are many
different task management/project management systems out there, and clients
interfacing with multiple technology suppliers may not want to learn all of
them. Email has one (simple) interface that you can use to delegate tasks to
all your suppliers regardless of what management software they use.
Furthermore, the client creating the task may not be able to describe it to
the same extent that an engineer needs, or know enough to fill out all the
meta data required.

To this end, they send their task via email to the engineer (or project
manager) and this person enters it into their company's management tool,
transmuting it into the appropriate technical specs/jargon at this point.

This may seem like an "extra step", but there are tools for Outlook/gmail to
create tasks in popular task management software such as JIRA or Basecamp.
Furthermore, someone will likely still have to clean the data up to make it
engineer friendly, and assign it to someone. As long as this has to be done,
it doesnt seem like copying/pasting an email into a task description is really
that much extra work.

------
richardk
This article is a wake up call, thank you.

------
ChristianMarks
Marx thought he could change human nature too.

