Notification email text -- amend to reduce emails to iRecord inbox

[sacrevert]

Notification emails are currently laid out as follows:

This format does not make the information about not replying to the email very conspicuous. As a result, the UKCEH iRecord inbox receives regular replies that require forwarding. I suggest that a small tweak to the email formatting would reduce this task considerably. My minor rearrangement is as follows:

I'm not sure who would be best placed to implement this change.

[sacrevert]

I see that this also applies to other notification types, this one is even worse for hiding the "do not reply" information IMHO:

[cubitmg]

Is this really the right approach? Can I ask why the reply-to for these emails is the iRecord Inbox? Why doesn't it go to a [email protected]? This is common practice in the commercial world and quite appropriate in my opinion.

[sacrevert]

No idea. Presumably to try and be helpful. @DavidRoy and @kitenetter would be best placed to comment.

[kitenetter]

My recollection is that there was a technical reason why we had to use irecord@ but I am not certain, and perhaps @BirenRathod can say more.

It is true that where such replies contain useful information we do try to forward them on to the relevant verifiers, so to that extent it is helpful, albeit at the expense of the time required to do this.

[cubitmg]

Thinking about this further I feel that the current emails go against the usability heuristic #8: Aesthetic and Minimalist Design and it gets in the way of the user reading the notifications themselves. The reason for my original comment was that the proposal seemed to make this worse as it further "competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility".

The paragraph in the 'Verification of your records' notification explaining about adding a comment and having a link directly to the record in question is excellent in content. However, as well as the usability point, we know that users typically don't read such paragraphs and are most likely to skip onto the actual record notifications.

More radically, how about having a brief note about replying / commenting with the notification itself and moving the "Please do not reply..." para to the end of the email. The rationale being that the combination of the noreply@ and the 'To reply...' link may be just as effective and improve the usability of the email.

If we are worried about being helpful then the noreply@ inbox could still be monitored periodically to both see how well the email design is working and to forward on to verifiers if required.

On a related topic the 'Record Cleaner results for your records' notifications really don't meet our usability heuristics which would say that a warning message should be issued as the record is being entered. This would allow the user to check and reconsider or be guided to add additional information or a photo at data entry time. This would save users and verifiers time and effort. I don't know whether this is already an aspiration for an iRecord enhancement?