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Back in March I signed up for an account on Venmo because people said it was going to be a game changer. I thought I’d give it a go and planned to take a second look when time permitted. I haven’t found the time, but since signing up my only other experience with them has been a weekly email to remind me that:

• I have received no money
• I have sent no money
• I have no friends
• I am not active
• I need to make these emails stop showing up… but who has the time?

I don’t mind that status emails like this get sent out, but in this scenario.. it’s just not valuable. Is it necessary to communicate that nothing has happened?¹ To be fair, Venmo is in beta and is working out the kinks. They are far from the only service that does this, they just happen to be the one that triggered this post (which I will be pointing them to). :-)

There’s a ton of information being sent to people’s inboxes every day. When we decide to communicate with our users, we should be mindful of the value of the information as well as how and when we ask for their attention. Is the email useful? Is it actionable? Or is it just undesired noise?

¹ Context is fundamental here. If you’re a sales manager and your sales team has had zero sales… this might be valuable information.

In part 4 of our 5 part series, we feature Planet Argon, by Robby Russell.

In part 3 of our 5 part series, we feature Planet Argon, by Allison Beckwith.

Jump to part 1

Today, in part 2 of our 5 part series, we feature Planet Argon, by Carlos Rodriguez.

Jump to part 1

We recently got together as a team to work on an art project. The goal for this project was for each of us to paint our own Planet Argon logo. Allison started us off by tracing our logo on five blank canvases with pencil. She then tossed acrylic paint supplies on the floor and said have fun.

Over each of the next five days, we’ll share each of ours.

Today, we feature Planet Argon, by Ryan Gensel

Last year we were happy to sponsor (and participate) in the RubyConf5k. We helped sponsor t-shirts, which meant we’d have our logo included on the back of the shirt.

On the morning of the race, I was looking at the freshly-printed shirts and noticed, “203” above our logo. What did this mean? After a few minutes, I realized that this was our studio’s suite number!

So… the backstory.

On the day that we needed to send over the logo, Allison was out of the studio. I decided to look for a file myself and began rummaging through the Dropbox where our InDesign files are located in search of a B&W graphic with our logo in it. Apparently, the file I found had the number 203 at the top of the image but I completely missed that when opening it up.

Lesson learned? Always have someone else double-check something before it ends up being printed on the back of a t-shirt. :-)

It doesn’t seem like it was very long ago that our team was helping build and launch a web application for the 2006 World Cup for Nike, but it’s been over four years. The last time the matches aired, we didn’t consist of many (soccer) fans, but that’s changed!

Over the coming weeks… I’m sure the World Cup matches will dominate the presence on the projector screen.

Our healthcare provider’s employer web interface for making online payments is using the latest in web technology…

My favorite is that the, “Macintosh Platform can not support the site” versus… they haven’t taken the time to support the Macintosh platform.

While attempting to pay my cable internet bill… I found myself faced with Comcast’s sign in screen. I can’t help but wonder how much effort went into branding their sign in process with mySIGN-IN. Does their online account system really need a branded name (that you then have to explain what it is?) when they could probably suffice with, “Sign into your Comcast online account.” Not only that, someone had to design the graphics. Someone(s) had to approve the lower case “my” and the all-caps SIGN-IN. I’m baffled. The end-result? I wasn’t able to sign in with my email and password… and am now waiting for them to send me a PIN via snail-mail, which is something I’ll write about another time.

I came across this while signing up for a free trial account of Xero. A nice alternative to the annoying captcha.