As you can imagine, the Mild Fiancée and I have been spending a lot of time corresponding with vendors and guests lately. There are florists, photographers, venue coordinators, and various other vendors to work with. We tried to do as much of the work as we could up front, but there's always something that comes up. It's not necessarily stressful, but it does require some attention.
Now, the Mild Fiancée and I are both getting married, so we decided long ago that we would both participate in the process. Sure, there are certain things that I don't care as much about, much the same way that there are certain things she doesn't care much about. For those items, I tend to take a back seat. However, that doesn't get me off the hook. There's still quite a bit that I do want to concern myself with.
That particular tidbit is relevant because we tend to send emails that include the other. In short, we CC each other on a lot of emails. It's the quickest, simplest way of keeping each other in the loop. It means a little bit of extra email, but since this is email that we want to read, it works out well. I make sure to copy her when I'm making decisions with a vendor, or if it's going to impact anything that has dependencies down the line. In turn, she does the same thing with tasks that she's working on. The system works out well.
Well, the system mostly works. Every now and then, someone will break our scheme by refusing to reply to both of us. I will send an email, copy the Mild Fiancée, and then that person will only reply to me. I have even added her back in to the email thread on subsequent replies, but that person steadfastly refuses to use the "Reply All" functionality. I end up having to manually forward emails, or physically tell the Mild Fiancée that this person replied. It's the weirdest thing.
Keep in mind that we've also been sending a lot of emails lately, so we have a fairly decent sample size of these incidents. Over time, we noticed that there was a very high prevalence of this among iPhone users. It wasn't like this only happened with iPhone users, but I kept seeing the "sent from my iPhone" tag line when the person would only respond to me. It was enough to make us seriously question if there was a usability issue with iPhones that made it harder to use the Reply All functionality.
In fact, we got so curious, that I started doing research into potential software or UI issues in the software. As it turns out, we're not the only ones to have noticed this odd behavior. At least one other person asked that very same question. The answer, however, is pretty simple: people are lazy (Ockham's razor, anyone?). The default option is to only reply to one person, since that's more likely to be a useful/correct response. Moreover, if you're going to err on one side, it's safer to err on the side of not spamming everyone.
All in all, it's a pretty reasonable stance from the iPhone software. However, this then puts the onus on people/users to use the Reply All capability correctly when it's required. Apparently, we know quite a few folks that don't know how to use the Reply All feature. Mystery solved.
Now we just have to figure out how to get people to reply to the both of us (interestingly, one of the suggestions on that linked thread about the Reply All functionality was to educate people on the proper usage).
Now, the Mild Fiancée and I are both getting married, so we decided long ago that we would both participate in the process. Sure, there are certain things that I don't care as much about, much the same way that there are certain things she doesn't care much about. For those items, I tend to take a back seat. However, that doesn't get me off the hook. There's still quite a bit that I do want to concern myself with.
That particular tidbit is relevant because we tend to send emails that include the other. In short, we CC each other on a lot of emails. It's the quickest, simplest way of keeping each other in the loop. It means a little bit of extra email, but since this is email that we want to read, it works out well. I make sure to copy her when I'm making decisions with a vendor, or if it's going to impact anything that has dependencies down the line. In turn, she does the same thing with tasks that she's working on. The system works out well.
Well, the system mostly works. Every now and then, someone will break our scheme by refusing to reply to both of us. I will send an email, copy the Mild Fiancée, and then that person will only reply to me. I have even added her back in to the email thread on subsequent replies, but that person steadfastly refuses to use the "Reply All" functionality. I end up having to manually forward emails, or physically tell the Mild Fiancée that this person replied. It's the weirdest thing.
Keep in mind that we've also been sending a lot of emails lately, so we have a fairly decent sample size of these incidents. Over time, we noticed that there was a very high prevalence of this among iPhone users. It wasn't like this only happened with iPhone users, but I kept seeing the "sent from my iPhone" tag line when the person would only respond to me. It was enough to make us seriously question if there was a usability issue with iPhones that made it harder to use the Reply All functionality.
In fact, we got so curious, that I started doing research into potential software or UI issues in the software. As it turns out, we're not the only ones to have noticed this odd behavior. At least one other person asked that very same question. The answer, however, is pretty simple: people are lazy (Ockham's razor, anyone?). The default option is to only reply to one person, since that's more likely to be a useful/correct response. Moreover, if you're going to err on one side, it's safer to err on the side of not spamming everyone.
All in all, it's a pretty reasonable stance from the iPhone software. However, this then puts the onus on people/users to use the Reply All capability correctly when it's required. Apparently, we know quite a few folks that don't know how to use the Reply All feature. Mystery solved.
Now we just have to figure out how to get people to reply to the both of us (interestingly, one of the suggestions on that linked thread about the Reply All functionality was to educate people on the proper usage).
Comments
Post a Comment