Email notifications are an important part of a website, affecting usability and the whole user experience. They should be clear, short and shouldn’t look like spam.
"A better approach would be to put the important information on top…"
Emails are part of the service and users use them for later reference. One example is the messages sent by online ticket reservation systems.
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Lufthansa, the airline, sends confirmation emails that are almost worthless, just because a little detail. The message itself, the characters on it, doesn’t deliver important information for the user. On the other side, the important information is on a PDF document that can not be scanned by most email clients.
That means that emails will be very difficult to find once they are archived. The email subject doesn’t help either. A better approach would be to put the important information on top of the email body and subject! See how other airline is doing it better, read the article here.
Hi Alexis,
While your advice in this post is quite good, I wanted to let you know that clicking the link to read about another airline doing it better than Lufthansa does not take you to the actual article but only the category. I had to page next three times to find the article mentioning Germanwings which is found here: http://www.designvsart.com/blog/2007/10/24/improving-usability-with-proper-email-wording/.
Hope this helps. And I will pass your suggestions on to our technical team in Frankfurt.
Kind regards,
Michelle Schiff
Lufthansa German Airlines
Online Sales USA
Thank you, Michelle, for your comment. I hope the article helps making the Lufthansa website even better.
Alex