CSS support in mobile.me email?

June 10, 2008

Although the majority of the Freshview team slept blissfully through the WWDC keynote, we were all interested to hear about Apple's new Mobile Me service, which will replace .mac in July.

Once Apple's new web applications are up and running, we'll be sure to thoroughly test the .me email client and see how well it supports CSS in HTML email. If you can't wait for that, you can content yourself with an update to our CSS support chart which will be coming later this week.

In thinking about the continuity of email from desktop to web to mobile, one question occurs: How would you change your email newsletters if you new your readers were mobile, not sitting at their desk?

Would you make them shorter? Would you have different content? Less images? More links or less links? Your thoughts appreciated!

Update: One thing we forgot to mention is that Cameron Moll's excellent book on designing for mobile devices is on sale for $10 a pop! While not focusing on email design per se, it's still a great primer for those considering how best to approach designing for mobile devices.

Posted in: Observations & Answers

3 Comments

Maxine Sherrin
June 10, 2008 2:01pm

OK, I don’t want to sound like a negative nancy here, but, applications and services that truly work on the mobile are going to be those things that come from stepping back and firstly understanding the mobile context (deeply) and secondly our own service and how this fits into the mobile context. From the get-go you are going to need to brush aside probably just about everything you have learned about designing things to be used by people sitting in front of screens attached to computers. And start to think at a much deeper, more imaginative, and totally customised level than “fewer images”, “fewer links”, “fewer words”.
Mathew Patterson
June 10, 2008 2:20pm

I quite agree - but of course you still have to deal with the people who *are* at their desks. At this stage we have no way of knowing what email client people are using or where they are using it.

So sending something totally designed for mobile might not work for some major percentage of your audience.
Anna Yeaman
June 11, 2008 5:43am

I’ve read two arguments:

Identify and segment your mobile users, then design a campaign specifically for them. This might include fewer images, jump tags, a prominent phone no. near the top, shorter url’s and subject lines ect…

The other camp believe the mobile device acts as gatekeeper to the pc. So anything that does not grab subscribers attention is deleted and anything valuable or non-urgent gets viewed later on the pc. They say stick with a single design targeted at pc users.

I admit I assumed that mobile devices just grabbed the text only version, when I think most grab the text from the HTML version which can look a mess…

I noticed that women’s retailer Barrie Pace, adds the link, “View on Mobile Device” to the top of their emails. When you click you view a text only version. Neiman Marcus tried this out for about a month last year then dropped it. Maybe they were just trying to identify mobile users on their list?

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