I have so many questions after finishing that article, but first to come to mind is: who puts a HTML FAQ in their e-mail signature? Seriously, who does that?
I was going to ask the same about googling "gmail", clicking the second link, and actually sending a blank email. But apparently the answer is "thousands of people" a day.
It's probably healthy for us "web people" to get a reminder every so often that vast swaths of humanity use computers in ways that are nearly incomprehensible to us.
The world's fastest typist, Sean Wrona, would abhor that - he uses capslock instead of shift(!) He can go 200WPM+ so, clearly he's doing something right...
I assume there's a point in overall speed where the slowdown from caps-up/down -> letter-up/down -> caps-up/down is worth the reliability drop from coordinating shift-down -> letter-up/down -> shift-up. I think I hit that point sometimes entering passwords and other frequently entered info, but the reality is for most typing none of us get there.
Seriously, the number of wrong turns you had to take to get there... wtf? I kind of feel like from a UI perspective, you can try to make your site as usable as possible, but someone will always run into the dumbest edge case or contact you to ask questions which are clearly answered on the site.
Yikes! At first glance I thought those were questions to Mr. Peck and thought it was fine, but if that's the signature.... It's a little presumptuous isn't it.
It's my email FAQ. I get a lot of email - it's my largest social network containing 1000's of connections. I came up with the idea of the FAQ to head off having to answer the same questions over and over again. I used to have it as a list of social networks (twitter/skype/phone, etc.) but people ignored that. And that didn't allow me to give the details the FAQ does. The FAQ catches people's attention better than the traditional signature. It has cut down on those kinds of questions by ~70-80%, I'd say. So maybe it's presumptuous, but it was the more successful of my A/B testing. And it's not as noticeable when there's a big ol' email on top of it. So WHO does something like that?!! Me. I do.
With respect, the very people you are covering for a living probably find that signature obnoxious. Speaking for myself, I certainly would; I never thought I'd see an e-mail signature worse than a paragraph of unenforceable legal disclaimer, but alas, I have.
One thing you've probably overlooked is that a significant majority of mail agents (a) discard HTML, making your carefully-formatted signature render in ways that you have not anticipated or dropping it altogether, and/or (b) do not thread and hide quotes the same way yours does. In addition, you're now making me download and potentially display that signature every time you reply to me. On mobile, this can be a big deal in a deep thread where 70% of the data in a message could end up being your repeated signature.
I'm assuming that your workflow is top-posting and letting Gmail hide the repeated signature from you. That gets really unworkable, really quickly in any client that is not Gmail, particularly with a huge HTML signature that is repeated on every message. Since one of the primary topics of your publication is engineering types, you might find that this signature is doing you more harm than good with them. (Though I grant that you probably correspond more with PR and management people, who love Comic Sans signatures.) I don't think your A/B testing can account for that. There is a far better solution in Gmail's canned responses, which really should be promoted from a fucking Lab already:
The other thing you probably haven't accounted for is that I very quickly pick up on someone being annoyed that I've e-mailed them. Your signature basically says "you are an inconvenience to me," by demonstrating that you've put a lot of thought into lowering the questions that you answer. I feel the same way about "Before you e-mail me, please read this:" and the other things overworked e-mailers ask me to do as a method of transferring work. I generally end up in a "oh, you don't want me to e-mail you? Okay!" attitude when dealing with this sort of thing.
The signature lightly betrays that you do not generally value engaging with the people that e-mail you and turns me off to you, which might be hurting you with sources. We all hate e-mail, yet the best e-mail correspondents find ways to manage the workload without betraying that their conversational partner is an inconvenience to their life. Seeing as dealing with people via correspondence is probably half of your chosen profession, I'd hope that's not the message that you intend to convey.
The new canned responses take 2-3 clicks to get one answer in. That would add a lot of unnecessary time wasted each day. Perhaps there is a middle ground for Sarah that contains a link to an updated page with this info?
I imagine far fewer people would get the answers if a click was required. Pretty basic user tendencies.
Honestly, I don't get the irritation of the parent comment. I'm drowning in email....and I'm not a public figure. If I saw something like that FAQ, I would just assume the person was flooded with mail, and doing me a favour by answering any common questions.
