Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

Google has been innovating like crazy lately and it’s awesome and humbling to see how quickly they increase the depth and breadth of their offerings. One of their products I like a lot is Google Alerts. Essentially, you enter a search you’re interested in using any search operator and you get emailed at a frequency of your choice.

A simple feature well executed that I was able to look at and start using right away. We should all be striving for that. One point to note - the whole feature is irrelevant if they can’t deliver good results. Don’t forget about the content. Assuming that’s a given, it’s worth looking at the feature in more detail.

The Google Alerts Homepage

You don’t need to have a Google account to create an alert. You only need it to manage them all from one place. This prevents signing up for an account from being a barrier to deriving value from the feature while still providing a reason to sign up for active alerts users.

• Google Account holders who aren’t signed in also create alerts from this interface.
• Non account holders can sign up for 10 alerts at a time. If they confirm their alerts, they can sign up for more.
  • One point to note: if you sign up for multiple alerts, you’ll get multiple emails.
• Search terms can contain anything you can type into Google
• Type can be
  • News
  • Blogs
  • Web
  • Groups
  • Comprehensive
• Frequency
  • Once a day
  • As it happens
  • Once a week

Confirmation Email

• People without a Google account and account-holders who aren’t signed in all get a confirmation email. This enables positive confirmation which is important for email deliverability.

• In addition, while it may seem like an obstacle to adoption, the fact is that alerts are ‘pull’ features. People choose to use them. As a result, a simple, 1-page, clear email like this makes it likely that the drop-off rate of people who signed up but didn’t confirm their email is low.

• Another benefit that I got to experience firsthand is that if someone signs you up for alerts without your knowledge, you only get one email. A good friend signed me up for all of Daily Candy’s email alerts without my knowledge. When I returned from vacation with 200+ emails, I really understood the value of the confirm step.

Alert Email

• Once you start getting alerts, the emails are sparse and to the point.
• The word “Google” is mentioned four times in a five line email, so they’re not shy about branding.
• The alert reminds you of its settings
  • “Google Blog Alert for: judysbook”
  • “This as-it-happens alert…”
• Another great thing about this is that the email doesn’t make you scroll.
• I really like the Remove/Create/Manage links at the bottom of the message.

Managing Alerts

Google’s Alert management interface is clean, simple and efficient. It’s not the most visually stunning piece of work, but it does the job and gets out of your way. You need a Google account to access this interface. If you choose not to sign up for one, your email management options are limited to the links at the bottom of each alert email you receive.

• One line per alert is great and the column structure, while it’s not pretty, gets the point across
• Delete & New are separated by the full width of the screen
• Edit and New Alert controls are clustered together
• They provide checkboxes for multi-alert delete (which seems obvious, but is forgotten a lot. Even the iPhone requires you to delete messages one by one.)

Creating an Alert from the Management Interface

• The new alert process is also straightforward and alerts are created inline.
• This is efficient and also keeps your other alerts handy so you can keep those settings in mind as you create your new alert.
• There’s an assumption baked into here that you will want all your alerts to be of the same format
• No support for sending alerts to email addresses other than the one associated with your Google account.

Editing Alerts from the Management Interface

• Editing also takes place inline
• They provide a cancel button which often gets omitted
• I like the use to yellow highlighting to make the alert you’re editing stand out.
  • This isn’t needed when creating an alert because you’re working on a new line which provides the visual separation

Manage Alerts - The Empty State

One of the most often forgotten aspects of design is dealing with the empty state. We don’t do a good job of it at Judy’s Book. Basically, what you do display on the user’s very first interaction with a feature. This doesn’t need to be a fancy sound-playing-animation-heavy flash demo, just a simple text cue and call to action is sufficient.