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The history of art and the finiteness of human production

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There is so much ART, but its actually limited. A computer could understand all of the art humanity has produced and analyze it down to its features. Color, stroke, contrast, characters, symbolism. All the symbolism that is produced for meaning can be interpreted.

Computers could understand the components that underline meaning in art. Computers have all of the historical context and relational knowledge to make connections people dont make. The internet’s resources provide all of the resources to interpret cultural value. Think about the biographical information about author. The social connections depicted in papers and history books. The cultural leaders of a time, the records of travel, the economic and social influences.

Does anyone know what field of academic study this would fall under?

Time as an asset in mobile development

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Time as an asset in mobile development

User experience guidelines for mobile devices have become clearly defined in recent years. Developers have learned how to utilize the limits of a small screen size and prioritize content. Applications targeted at younger demographics (think SnapChat) are successfully leveraging intuitive interfaces for digital natives. There are not many impressive interfaces designed to utilizes time as a resource.
What is out there?

Read later apps touch on the idea of using your current attention to make you more intentional in the future. The notion of a bookmark lets you keep something for later, so you can return to it as needed. Services like Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability, effectively give people a infinite memory bank, where they can collect and store content they discover. This concept works well when used on mobile phones to provide access to content without an internet connection. Similarly, it can make it easy to discover content on one device, then access it on another later.

Time as a design element

Time is an important resource in designing a user experience. Resource value in screen real estate, color priorities, internet connection speed, and many other factors are already kept in mind. Time and its use for the future is not something that actively feel triggered to think about. Time, as a design element, could be used to direct users intelligently.

Current applications are constantly trying to one-up users for a little bit more time. They want to show you one more advertisement or find a hook to get you to come back one more time. Your inbox is bombarded with daily update emails, requests for browser notification access, and too many tracking pixels.

People don’t like distractions. Intentionally creating distractions is disrespecting the end user who makes a company even possible! What if platforms made a better effort at allowing their users to decide how frequently they wanted to engage? What if all the data crunching and analysis that is done to find common trends amongst high value users was used to create a high value experience for users that don’t want to spend their time budgeted for other services?

This is where using time as a design element starts to make sense.
Where it works

Email newsletters are a great to subscribe to a future time commitment for content. Users sign up to email newsletters because they like the content being produced. They are subscribing to the idea that they will get more of the same kind of content. The unspoken contract is that the email address, which is a door into the user’s attention, will be respected.

Email newsletters lose their value when the user’s inbox is overwhelmed with too many emails. Like real life mail, too much email goes unopened and ignored.

Monthly gatherings are another good example. A predetermined amount of time is being committed to a predetermined purpose, with an expectation of some predetermined experience. This is good. For a person who participates in a community, either on or off the internet, a budgeted length of time is great.

The goal here is not to come up with a system for creating a structure for predetermining how time is used. The goal is to come up with a solution for companies resort of attention grabbing.

Where it doesn’t work
The “save for later” services have some basic faults.

First, when the content goes into the bookmarking service, and into the “read later” display, the content producers lose access to the ad impressions/tracking needed to pay for the content. This has its obvious issues for the content producers and seemingly less obvious issues for the consumer. When content producers are not getting a return on investment for their product, they can’t continue producing content. The ads and tracking itself isn’t bad, its the way they are being implemented. Right now, it doesn’t work for the user and the producer.

Second, when the rate of saving content is higher than the rate of consuming content, the saved content is forgotten. People develop habits around bookmarking and categorizing bookmarked content. Most people aren’t sophisticated enough to create a process for consuming saved content, and eventually never do. Saving content without determining when it will be consumed is DOA.

Time as a design resource on mobile

With mobile devices in particular, time is a great design resource. Since user’s are forced to interact with one piece of content at a time, understanding how to leverage the mechanics of intentional delayed engagement is important. Content should be designed with the notion that it is not going to receive the full attention of a user. That doesn’t mean that it can’t at some future time.

What would incentivize companies to adopt time as a design resource?

How to write Desktop-first responsive emails

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Most web pages are written with the assumption that all the content is loaded, then the CSS determines the priority for styling. In emails, you have to design your CSS/class/markup base on the assumption that you can have some parts of your code NOT run.

When it comes to responsive layouts, you have to design for the case where desktop is default (without the media queries) and any media queries are added, only if its possible to run inline styles. In the case where you have things like Gmail, where the style tags are stripped out, you need to account for this.

Inliner from Zurb Foundation — http://foundation.zurb.com/emails/inliner.html

Inliners

Most email browsers don’t read style tags. As a result, you have to write your emails with all the CSS properties as style tags in the html tag. This is called inlined CSS. Instead of writing the raw HTML with inlined CSS, there are many services or libraries for inlining a block of HTML and CSS.

The problem with email inliners, like Rail’s Roadie, was that it was inlining the media query styles that would run on mobile, which broke the default desktop layout. By having roadie ignore certain styles, we control the designed layout to render the desktop mode in all cases, and then serve the inline style tag with media queries to be run where possible.

To make things more complicated, Outlook is very outdated. Specifically, there are a lot of CSS3 properties and even CSS2 properties it doesn’t render. As a result, outlook has some legacy hacks where you can use comment flags to tell Outlook NOT to render certain content.

Basics

For responsive emails, where you use media queries, you have to keep a few things in mind.

1. The email is being inlined
2. Email browsers render CSS2 on average
3. You have some email browsers that have comment hacks (ie. outlook)

Where to start

Write Desktop-First HTML and CSS

Based on this factor, you have to code your emails to be desktop-first. The CSS, without any media queries, need to look good on desktop email browsers. This way, you can assume at the very least, the email looks like this:


Add Media Query for mobile CSS

Considering you want to add a media query, you need to add an inline media query on the email. This is pretty straight forward for desktop rendering. For example, you would get something like this:


Setup your inliner

The problem comes up in emails, the two conditions above don’t work perfectly. For CSS to render in emails, it needs to be inlined. This means that the desktop or media query conditions don’t jive well together. This why we started with the Desktop-First css structure. One you inline your css, when theres a media query, you get this mess:


Consider your inliner to ignore media query for inline

When you have a media query, the media queries CSS gets inlined, and consequently overrides the desktop CSS. As a result, you get markup that looks broken. To prevent this, you have to queue your CSS inliner to ignore the media query CSS. To do this, you separate the media query CSS in a seperate style tag and you flag it in the inliner. In the case for Roadie, thats the `roadie-ignore` flag. This way you get this:


Wrap up

By setting the inliner to ignore the media query style tag, you allow all email browsers to render the working desktop CSS. In the case that the email browser will parse the style tag, it can view the media query and optionally render the mobile styles when relevant. This is how you can have cross-email-browser functional CSS emails!

This was written as a comment in a pull request for C2, a project at 18F. We are using this responsive email structure to make our transactional emails better for our end users. We are also doing some awesome stuff. Reach out if you want to learn more.

On email newsletters for Big Media

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Publishers are finding that the best way to access millennial audiences is through email. New email newsletters are drawing attention from media execs and celebrities and attracting corporate level ad partnerships. Publications are taking email newsletters promotion seriously, with prominent signup placements on every page.

Buzzfeed successfully ramped up email newsletters

Buzzfeed reported a 23% month-over-month rate of growth on traffic-to-site generated from newsletters. The New York Times boasted 14% growth over a 6-month period from February 2015, to August. The Transparency Market Report forecasted a 20% compounded annual growth rate for email market capacity from 2012 to 2018.

Big Media companies are missing a huge opportunity to reach loyal audiences through email. Email newsletter lists are growing at an exponential rate, but the methods for using them haven’t changed.

“There’s tremendous opportunity for marketers who perfect their email tactics” — Kristin Naragon, Adobe’s Director of Email Solutions

Dynamic channel

Email is treated as a one-track one-way broadcast channel. Layouts and content are statically created and sent out to entire email lists. Personalization and dynamic content is not yet a norm. Email has the potential to operate as a smart social channel where publications are able to personally connect with users. By not investing in technology or tools to make this possible, media companies are missing a huge opportunity.

“When it is read in the e-mail newsletter format, it’s so much cleaner, and the images and the words — it’s almost a throwback to reading magazines.” — Jessica Gross

Innovative brands

Readers love email as a medium to receive content online. Email has proved itself useful for innovative brands and companies. The internet admires niche email newsletters like Amy Webb’s technology writeup “Notes From The Near Future” and Melody Kramer’s “Sandbox”. Curated digests like The Daily Skimm or Hype Machine’s weekly “Stack” boast large open rates. Tech startups, such as Quibb and Nuzzel, have used email as their primary medium for distribution and growth. Calculated content production and circulation strategies have allowed massive growth and scale using email.

Really Good Emails collects good email marketing designs

Social channel

“We’ve found that not only is email one of the top 5 or 6 referrers of traffic, but visitors from newsletters are some of the most engaged readers spending 3 minutes longer on the site than other channels.” — Dan Oshinsky, Director of Newsletters at BuzzFeed

Compared to other social networks

Each service has an ideal publishing time, appropriate technique for recirculating older content, and intricate engagement strategy. Twitter can have the same article posted multiple times a day. Facebook descriptions and titles are meticulously targeted at communities. Instagram crops are made irresistibly beautiful. In each case, there is a science.

Email is better than social platforms on a number of fronts. Email doesn’t fight opaque algorithms to surface, like Facebook. Emails aren’t buried in a user’s timeline, like Twitter. Email is prominently visible on every device a user may use. Email is recoverable through client search. Emails can be viewed over and over again.

Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, and other email distributors publishes annual performance stats.

Email user behavior and identifiable qualities should be used to optimize email pleasantness. The industry standard, as reported by Mailchimp, is 20–30% open rates. This signals a horrible “platform”. Similar reports state 1–3% open rates. This is even worse. That means out of 100 people who you sent an email to, approximately 25 people looked at it. Of those 25, it is still just one to two people who clicked on something. This is horrible. Email can perform much better.

Email campaigns that randomly segment email databases, for A/B tests on designs are missing the point. Email services only track the metrics around emails that are concerned with technical functionality. Dashboards report open rates, click-through, email driven entries, and bounce rates. There is so much more opportunity.

Once someone signs up to an email, you can find out a lot of things. You know the IP address of the person who signed up. That means, you can estimate where they are. That means, you know their time zone. That means, you shouldn’t send them emails in the middle of the night. Right?

Once they open their first email, you can also find out a lot of things. You know their IP address again, so you can verify your first assumption. You can also start a trend graph of when this user likes to open emails. That is what time of the day they should get the email, based on that time zone we discovered.

Personalizing based on usage

If they happen to click on something, then you have even more data. You could classify your links and content before sending the email, and begin identifying the user’s interests. If you have images, then you can start understanding the trends in image performance in relation to the user.

There is real value to users, beyond the creepy reality that comes with tracking. When publications are making quality content, that users are legitimately interested in, the distribution mechanics are important. This method for targeting could be used for sleazy marketing emails and spam, but thats not the focus.

Napkin math

Operating on basic assumptions, you can begin to estimate the potential financial benefit to a technically developed email strategy. Take the email newsletter list size, take the average site entries per email, multiply it by the ad impressions per visit, and estimate the cost per ad impression (CPM).

Using conservative numbers, we can estimate actual monetary value. Imagine a email newsletter of 100,000 users with a 10% click through rate. Assuming two page views per visit and two ads per page view (around industry average), you have 40,000 ad impressions generated a day. At a CPM of $5, thats $200 a day, or $6000 a month, or a bit more than $72,000 a year. The ad impression revenue alone is a significant sum that would manage costs of employee and tools. Add email sponsorships and the emails are even more valuable.

My napkin math with variable click through rate and CPM.

Big Media companies have email lists that are a factor of three to five times larger, around 300,000 to 500,000. The clickthrough rates are also much higher, closer to 13–20%, on well designed newsletters, as seen in Buzzfeed and the NYTimes. The CPM for larger brands are also much higher, from $5 up to $15, based on the audience. Assuming the new variables for Big Media, the $72,000 a year in revenue skyrockets to hundreds of thousands and millions.

Investment in developing email has an undeniable revenue opportunity for Big Media. Assuming a large organization, CPM will be static from year-to-year, but open rates can be optimized. If the vectors mentioned above are utilized, I believe existing open rates could be doubled. Beyond design and subject line optimizations, there are large-scale technology improvements that could make a difference.

Email is worth exploring.

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Thoughts on Media is a community publication on Medium, curated by ReadThisThing.