Lately my industry has hit a new trend that I've fallen in love. Basically, each night all the departments on a live performance receive performance reports, reports listing what went well and what went wrong in the performance, as well as start times, run times, audience size, etc...
In the olden days, these were posted or hand distributed. Then over time they moved to being emailed out as PDF attachments, still formatted to perfect beauty as the old printed copies. Now more and more, the attachment is forgone and the data is just typed directly into the body of the email. Sure it doesn't have the glitz of a pristine PDF with the production font and header, but with one glance I can see the numbers I want to see from my iPhone.
I find it funny that it took us until mobile devices to get to the point where we are using email as intended, instead of as a vector for attaching PDFs.
Not to mention pointless Word documents, "templates" that include background images and difficult-to-read colors and fonts, signatures with embedded artwork, screensful of pointless legalese, and top-posted histories of conversations almost, if not entirely unrelated to the present message.
In other words, it's not at all clear to me how additional features would help decrease email's signal-to-noise problems when users themselves choose to create the noise.
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Lately my industry has hit a new trend that I've fallen in love. Basically, each night all the departments on a live performance receive performance reports, reports listing what went well and what went wrong in the performance, as well as start times, run times, audience size, etc...
In the olden days, these were posted or hand distributed. Then over time they moved to being emailed out as PDF attachments, still formatted to perfect beauty as the old printed copies. Now more and more, the attachment is forgone and the data is just typed directly into the body of the email. Sure it doesn't have the glitz of a pristine PDF with the production font and header, but with one glance I can see the numbers I want to see from my iPhone.
I find it funny that it took us until mobile devices to get to the point where we are using email as intended, instead of as a vector for attaching PDFs.
Not to mention pointless Word documents, "templates" that include background images and difficult-to-read colors and fonts, signatures with embedded artwork, screensful of pointless legalese, and top-posted histories of conversations almost, if not entirely unrelated to the present message.
In other words, it's not at all clear to me how additional features would help decrease email's signal-to-noise problems when users themselves choose to create the noise.
Simple. Effective.