Email has many uses

Looking at my inbox today, I see email that is used for many things other than inter-personal communication. Email is used for:

• Correspondence - actual communication with another human
• Receipts - documents like you might get in the physical mail
• Login support - "We've sent a code to your email to verify it's you."
• Notifications
  • Statement is available
  • Bill notice
  • Account security alerts
  • Package tracking

Most of these are not inter-personal communication. So why do we use email for most of those things?

Some email was a replacement for sending me a physical letter, such as the statement or bill examples. In a physical letter, the actual details of the statement or bill would be included, not just a notification of the existence of a statement or bill.

Since email was insecure for so long, sending a notification was the more secure option: notify the customer that the document exists and then the customer has to prove who they are to get access to the document.

But what if...

What if there was another mechanism for notifications? Something like the notifications on your phone or computer:

"Company X would like to send you notifications that your statement is available.  (Accept, Deny)"

In that scenario, the company would have to prove they are who they say they are to the makers of the operating system.

Better yet, what if companies managed encryption keys along with my user account information? Then the company could send me my statement via email more securely, not just a notification of the statement.

Why notification emails bother me

Notification email bothers me because the sender is putting more work on me. I once heard an email inbox described as a "world writable todo list".

When I get a notification email:

• Read the email
• Make a note to go get the statement, or
• Login to the website, possibly with a "login support" email
• Find the statement
• View or download the statement

When I get a physical statement:

• Open the envelope
• View the statement
• If I want an electronic version, scan it

I have enough to do without navigating yet another different website to get my statement.

In summary

Email is used for too many things that are not correspondence with another human. Many of those uses produce a bad user experience. We've become accustomed to this bad experience, but I believe that we can do better.

A friend and I were discussing the merits of annotated lists of resources on the Internet. He has done a lot of reading about one of the topics discussed in The Mythical Man Month. There is already so much discussion available that he didn't think it was worth piling on with different ideas.

I argued that a list of resources, curated and annotated, is an extremely valuable resource for those interested in understanding the topic. Such a list is called a "Subject Bibliography" because it lists information about a subject.

Consider:

• http://example.com - A well-written critique of the foo system, focusing on it's scalability.
• https://www.example.com/foo - Technical description of the foo system. The section on usability is too brief. http://example.com/users has a better description, including how the scalability impacts usability decisions.

Versus:

• http://example.com
• https://www.example.com/foo
• https://example.com/users

Annotated links provide context for the reader. Bibliographies with descriptions or commentary, I believe, are more common in academia. I wish similar lists were created for non-academic audiences as well.

The investment of time to create such a list gives others useful background and a place to start. Given the choice of starting from a web search or someone's annotated reference, I would choose the curated list every time.

References

• The Organization of Information Daniel N. Joudrey and Arlene G. Taylor, with the assistance of Katherine M. Wisser, Bibliographies, subject 4th ed., Libraries Unlimited, 2018.

My desire for better information organization comes from experience. Specifically, events that span document types in disparate storage systems. For example, a car accident or medical issue with tax implications.

For a car accident, I might have:

• Pictures of the damage.
• A copy of my auto insurance policy.
• Contact information for: the other driver, the repair shop, etc.
• A police report.
• Notes about time, date, and state of the repairs or claim.
• Links to online resources such as insurance forms.

That information might be stored in:

• My smartphone's photos and/or backed up online.
• PDFs.
• Entries in my phone's addressbook.
• Email.
• Text files or an online note taking app (like Evernote or Microsoft OneNote).
• Browser bookmarks.

Using that many information repositories is a terrible user experience.

Not only do I have the stress of the event and repairs, but now I have to remember where I stored some critical piece of information or find it on demand (no easy task).

I think we can do better. And that belief is what triggered my interest in personal information organization and systems to support that organization and usability.