We’re ramping up our emailing efforts and decided to start sending out HTML newsletters to customers. (We’ve always sent out plain-text emails but figured some minimal styling would help liven things up a bit.) So we designed a nice, simple email using clean code. The first one is this brief Basecamp Newsletter.

It took a while to get to this version though. First, we ran our simply styled email through Mailchimp Inbox Inspector (demo), a useful tool you can use to view HTML newsletters in a variety of email apps.

It came up perfect everywhere except Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail, and Lotus Notes. Strangely, it looked fine in Outlook 2006 but busted in Outlook 2007.

The reason? As Campaign Monitor put it, Microsoft decided to take email design back 5 years.

As I type this post I still can’t believe it. I’m literally stunned. If you haven’t already heard, I’m talking about the recent news that Outlook 2007, released next month, will stop using Internet Explorer to render HTML emails and instead use the crippled Microsoft Word rendering engine.

First things first, you need to realize that Outlook enjoys a 75-80% share of the corporate email market, which is similar to Internet Explorer’s share of the browser market – they make the rules…The reality is that many of us are going to have to scale back our email templates to years past and stick with tables and inline CSS if we want consistent looking emails in Outlook and Windows Live Mail.

No background images, no float or position (tables only), really poor support for padding/margin, etc. For real!? It’s like a time warp to making web pages in 1999. But what can ya do when Outlook’s got a 75-80% share for corporate email?

So we dove into the world of bulletproof, “work anywhere” templates. You can find them at Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, or elsewhere.

But the code is real gobbledygook. Lots of this sorta thing:

Totally drops the “beautiful code” limbo bar to the floor. Bummer.

What can be done to make this situation better? Check out these posts from Campaign Monitor that seek to improve the situation: Why we need standards support in HTML email and Help us form a baseline for standards support.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

New Basecamp feature: Significantly improved search
Today we launch a few major improvements to Basecamp search: 1. Search is significantly faster. 2. You can now search to-dos and milestones. 3. You can now search all your projects at once. We hope the faster, more comprehensive, more flexible search speeds up your productivity.

Campfire + Pyro = Collaboration Heaven
Jordan Golson talks about how Campfire is helping his team collaborate on a new site. “You don’t have to worry about missing anything when you are away from your desk because when you sign back into Campfire, everything that has been said in the past is there waiting for you. It’s great if you work with a bunch of people in all different places and time zones.”

Fuego founder uses Highrise to de-clutter inbox and centralize notes/tasks
“Highrise rocks because it’s the perfect place for me to keep all the notes I used to keep on people locked away in Word notebooks. Now they’re attached directly to the person and searchable.”

Gym Jones
The Colonel writes: “Simply amazing. These are the guys that trained the cast of 300… brutally.

Tasty bits:

Gym Jones is not a cozy place. There’s no AC, no comfortable spot to sit and there are no mirrors. Stressors are intentionally designed to cause discomfort and apprehension. Effort and pain may not be avoided. Physical and psychological breakdowns occur…

Gym Jones is private and isolated from the modern fitness ideal precisely because we believe that attitude to be poison. We believe that a proper training facility is separated from the complacency of the general public, and has its own set of rules and values. We believe that nothing of value maybe acquired by simply going through the motions; real fitness is earned…

From its birth in December 2003 Gym Jones has followed the Fight Club model of “free to all” though not all are invited. Those who are do not pay. No one may buy their way in or buy anything associated with the project. The original model will exist in a back room under my guidance whether we open other doors to the public or not.

Last but not least, a photo of the original gym.”

Moosejaw
Caryn Rose writes: “Check out the text in this order status update. What a refreshing change from the normal ‘DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL’ bs. All of this merchant’s communications have the same spirit and tone. I’ll definitely remember them, and order from them again.”

David

Currently keynoting RailsConf Europe in Berlin (Notes from his keynote).

Jason

Keynoting the MIMA 2007 Summit in Minneapolis, MN on October 3rd.

Storytelling at the BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence, RI on Oct 10-11.

Ryan

Speaking at the Future of Web Design conference in NYC on Nov 7.

Want us to speak at your event?

We’re available to speak at your event, workshop, or conference. Topics include Getting Real, conceptual interface design, Rails/programming, collaboration strategies, and entrepreneurship. Just get in touch by emailing email [at] 37signals.com with details. Thanks.

Why do so many companies selling cables show you this bird’s eye view…

...when what you really want is this view of the ends:

It’s not the cable that people care about. It’s the plug. The real question that needs to be answered: “Will this fit where I need it to fit?”

Makes you wonder how often web apps miss the point and show people the cable instead of the plug: Showing a list of features when people want benefits. Telling facts when people want stories. Showing screenshots when people want explanations.

Related: We were recently discussing Common Craft’s neat video tutorials that explain complicated concepts in “plain English.” Lots of sites try (and fail) to clearly explain social bookmarking or RSS. But Common Craft nails it.

The videos aren’t fancy. They’re not techy. They don’t show off interface widgets. But they succeed where it counts: They show how these tools fit into people’s lives. They show the plug, not the cable.

High Scalability offers some secrets to Amazon’s success based on interviews and writings of early employees. Some of the choice bits are below.

—

Teams are small. They are assigned authority and empowered to solve a problem as a service in anyway they see fit.

Work from the customer backward. Focus on value you want to deliver for the customer.

Force developers to focus on value delivered to the customer instead of building technology first and then figuring how to use it.

Start with a press release of what features the user will see and work backwards to check that you are building something valuable.

End up with a design that is as minimal as possible. Simplicity is the key if you really want to build large distributed systems.

Take it for granted stuff fails, that’s reality, embrace it. For example, go more with a fast reboot and fast recover approach. With a decent spread of data and services you might get close to 100%. Create self-healing, self-organizing lights out operations.

Open up your system with APIs and you’ll create an ecosystem around your application.

I recently had to call United’s customer service department. They have one of those voice prompt systems where you can answer questions by speaking into the phone and have the system automatically guide you to the right answer/representative. The problem: The system sucks.

Every interaction I’ve ever had with these voice recognition services feels like a battle. The system misunderstands what I’m saying. Or it confirms each entry by repeating it snail slooooow: “You said 32530021303. Is that correct?” I wind up feeling like I’m navigating a maze. It inevitably leads to me shouting answers or pleading “operator” in the hopes it’ll take me to an actual human (it doesn’t).

And whenever I hear someone else dealing with one of these systems, the same thing happens. They start out talking calmly but eventually wind up yelling into the phone.

Needless to say, any service that forces customers to scream is a bad idea. Screaming is something that we do when we’re frustrated or angry. But now that’s what I think of: United customer service = screaming. I can’t imagine a worse association for a company to have.

How O'Reilly went animal

“Edie Freedman was hired to design the first book covers. She thought the books had the strangest titles — sed and awk? — that evoked images of the popular fantasy game, “Dungeons and Dragons.” While looking for imagery, she came across the Dover Pictorial Archives, a series of books (and now CD-ROMs) containing copyright-free collections of 18th- and 19th-century wood and copperplate engravings of animals. She encountered a pair of slender lorises and had an epiphany. ‘That’s sed and awk!’ She scanned several animals from the archive and placed them on mock-up covers, which she then presented to everyone at O’Reilly. O’Reilly had ten or so employees at the time, and people wondered if the animals were appropriate. But Edie convinced them to follow her instincts. Customers wound up loving the covers, and a brand was born.”

When good design goes bad

“Ah, well. We’ll start over. It’s better to have something we’re both proud off than to try and salvage the work done so far. Sometimes you have to go all the way through the design process before you realize that you’ve built the wrong thing, but it’s ok, it’s a learning experience, it’s not the end of the world to take a deep breath and go back to step 1.”

Leaked Google video discusses Google Reader changes

“Calling tags ’labels’ is called ’kind of a historic accident and needlessly confusing’…Very soon, Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity.”

Facebook

Facebook’s “Are your friends already on Facebook?” option is a smart way to connect members of the site. No wonder other sites have been racing to implement similar features.

Ticketmaster

Anyone else finding captchas harder to solve these days?

Virgin America

Virgin America offers fares within the context of a week view so you can navigate easily forward or back to get a better deal.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

How to make Backpack dividers linkable
This tip makes Backpack dividers linkable — that way you can jump directly to a section, which can be helpful on longer pages.

New Highrise feature: Streamlined “edit contact” flow
We pushed an update that streamlines the “edit contact” process in Highrise. Before the update uploading a photo, editing contact information, and changing permissions was a 3-tab multi-click process. Now you can make all these changes on a single tab called “Contact and Permissions.”

Basecamp helps Epsilon Concepts communicate, manage projects, and handle worldwide staff collaboration
“The number one reason we love Basecamp: it’s a powerful, flexible, and extensible application that is actually EASY. Initially, when I decided to implement Basecamp for our project management needs, I was somewhat concerned that our less ‘computer literate’ clients may have reservations about jumping out of their e-mail accounts and into a program like Basecamp. This concern turned out to be completely bogus as to this day we haven’t had a single client that hasn’t been able to instantly understand, utilize, and harness the power of Basecamp.”