Email Attachments: Bad Usability Only You Can Prevent

May 20, 2008

Why put something in a Word or PDF file and email it, when you could simply include that information within the email body itself? Case in point:

A particuarly egregious offense — not only is the information within the PDF something that could be included in the body (a list of the our paid holidays), but the PDF is a scanned image of the the printed sheet. Thus, an email that should have been 4kb, and required no extra clicks, no weighs 200kb, and requires us to open Adobe Reader.