Each Its Own
“The most significant finding from our recent usability testing of ten email newsletters is that users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters. This is in strong contrast to studies of website usability, where users are usually much more oriented towards functionality. Even a website that you visit daily will feel like a tool where you want to get in and get out as quickly as possible and not connect with the site.”
- Jakob Nielsen’s “Design of Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off”
I find it useful every once in a while to remind myself that different tools have different uses. Different rooms in your house have different feelings, different usage. All sorts of stuff that we come into contact with triggers its own little preferred usage pattern: different friends, meals, traffic lanes, books, smells, weather patterns, fake handwriting on junk mail, etc.
We’re basically a walking collection of highly personalized, highly detailed instruction manuals for every situation possible. Even when we don’t know what to do, that gets its own usage pattern (nervousness, anxiety, fight or flight, etc). We are infinitely modal, infinitely redefining those modes.
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