I've created and emailed out many automated status reports during my career at Microsoft, consisting of everything from bug reports, to team status mails, to stress crash/uptime reports. And I'm sure that many of them immediately went into the trash. So here I'm going to throw out some information/tips which I've learned along the way.

 

To start with, I will categorize the audience into these groups.

Uninterested – These people really don't care (or are too busy to care) about what you have to say or the progress you/your team has made, they will see the subject line and immediately hit the delete key. (The really evil ones have setup a rule to automate the deletion, and for them there is no helping.)

Casual – This group of people might be mildly interested and may spend a few seconds looking at the first page of your email (or however much is displayed in the preview window). The actual duration is typically defined by how long it takes them to click on another email.

Invested – These individuals depend on, or are truly interested in your data. Unless the email is horribly presented, they will read and ingest the information no matter how bad or dry it is.

 

With these groups in mind, we will want to target how we supply information to make the most of their email browsing habits. In other words, we want to present our data in such a way that the first two groups get the important aspect of the message anyway.

The 0 Second Message

To target the uninterested audience, you need to supply the single most important piece of information in the subject line. This is the only place where you will get any amount of eye-ball time on your message, but make sure it is appealing and professional looking. If it looks like spam, it will be treated as such.

 

For example, this is the subject line on a bug report which is in my inbox:

 

Product XYZ bugs assigned to you @ 2008-02-11-08:03

 

The problem here is that it tells me very little about the bugs assigned to me. Plus, the date is redundant since any email application will display that anyway. The good thing they did was make it personal by stating "assigned to you", the less robotic an email is, the more compelling it becomes. Now take a look at this sample:

 

Your personal bug report for Product XYZ (1 active, 2 resolved)

 

I've placed the product name in the middle of the text, that way if the user was to sort on the subject, then all the bug reports, even if they are from multiple projects, will show up together. Secondly, we now provide the number and type of bugs that are assigned to me. This gives me some important context into the message, and if I start paying more attention, I will notice changes in the values: if I see a huge spike, I may be compelled to open and read the contents to see what changed.

The 3 Second Message

To make an impression on the casual viewers, you will only have about three seconds, if you are lucky, in which to convey as much information as possible. I have two rules of thumb here:

·         Focus on the top 2-3 inches of the mail, as this is the real estate which will be visible in most preview panes.

·         Make the information as visual as possible.

 

The hard part here is being creative. But luckily there are many interesting and off the wall ways to convey information. For example, if I needed to send out the list of tests which failed, the typical approach would be a raw listing of each failure. On the other hand if I were to feed some of the failure data into a tag cloud generator and place that first, then casual viewers would be able to quickly see the components which frequently failed and are the most at risk.

 

It also doesn't hurt to know your audience, for example, if you were working on a game project and wanted to convey project status, something like this might be appropriate:

 

Achievement

 

Along these lines, there are a plethora of web sites which will generate images with custom messages. Having Bart Simpson deliver your status on a chalk board might not be the most professional approach, it definitely gets points for being eye catching.

 

While not an email, the iGoogle site is also a good example nonetheless. With the customizable themes, the top of the page can convey information, most commonly time. But there is no reason someone couldn't create a theme which supplies a different message using the background images.

Wrapping It Up

In order for your message to be heard, you need to provide your information in a concise and appealing manner. It takes a lot less effort for a user to ignore or delete an email than it does for them to read it. This means you must be creative and compose your report in a compelling manner. You need to pull them in and make it interesting; otherwise, there isn't much value in sending the email in the first place.