A guide to email newsletters and RSS usability

Speaking for myself, I find the results of the below described study to be vague. The idea that 54% of the newsletter being skimmed just seems way too unlikely to me. Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking, but I am not convinced

Jakob Nielsen and Amy Schade of the Nielsen Norman Group just published a 544-page study on email newsletter usability, including 165 guidelines for subscriptions, content, managing accounts and RSS-based news feeds. It’s the third edition of the study, which the company has done about every two years so far.

One of the major findings was that users in the study spent 51 seconds on average scanning a newsletter, Nielsen told me. “The 51 seconds in extraordinarily valuable in forming a relationship with customer,” he said. Email overload is obviously a factor in email newsletter performance. “In the field study, watching people at their offices, it was more clear than ever that processing email is a somewhat stressful scenario. People scan the inbox list in quite a brutal manner. If they don’t think it’s worthwhile or spam, they delete it. If they open it, they spend a small amount of time on it.” … Source: ZDNet Blogs