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Emails were never intended as a form of chat type messaging. Remember that they are electronic versions of mail, so trying to modify them to be something they weren't designed for is a mistake. As to the reasons why we write the subject line first: The subject line is part of the header of an email (see the original RFC822 and the newer RFC5322), and ...


4

Users typically want to see the most recent activity first. Think tweets, online banking transactions, news updates. It makes it easy to see what's new since you last checked. With conversations, it's different because there is the context of whatever message came before and after the one you're looking at. It's a similar situation to what you see in ...


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37signals has a great example of how you can make this interesting for the user and help them understand your story. No offense to the HR professional who commented (though, it wouldn't be the first time I've offended HR), a history page that starts with the present is probably too much about what you want to say. Your current achievements are, hopefully, ...


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You should present the most important information first, and so that will determine the order that you present the logs in. For most logging applications, the most recent logs are more important, and so it's better UX to present the newest items first. However, there are situations where each log is fairly long, and either the older logs are more critical, ...


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As an HR professional, reverse chronological is ALWAYS the preferred order when looking for information. I don't need (or want) irrelevant information. I think you should determine how you want the information to be interpreted. Is it a story? From day 1. Is it a company update? Latest, first. You may need to evaluate who your audience is, as well. The ...


3

I would do it the easiest way: new logs at the top. Many applications with a dated list of items do their sorting this way; Outlook, gmail, twitter, windows event viewer, etc. Your users will be familiar with this style of layout, and find it easy to use - with the most urgent events immediately visible at the top.


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The information should be given in the order of importance. The vast majority of the time this will be reverse chronological, as more recent events are usually more important. However if older events are more important (for example if the page is stressing a rich history), then you should sort it chronologically. Here is an example from Royal Delft that ...


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As a reader, I want to know "Why are you sending me this email?" so I know whether it is worth my while reading it now, instead of doing all those other important things on my to-do list. As a reader, I expect the writer to know why they are sending me the email, and more to the point, I hope they will know why they are sending me the email before they ...


1

Good question, and I think that the reason is: 1 - e-mail was first specified in the RFC 733: in that specification there were a header and the body of the message. The header are the information used to send the email: (...) That is, a message consists of some information, in a rigid format, followed by the main part of the message, which is text ...


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There are two perspectives here. You are talking about your (writers's) perspective and it appears that thinking about an appropriate title is slightly demanding but when you look at reader's perspective, it makes perfect sense for him to read the Heading (Title of the email) first before the Continent. In your context, you seem to use EMAIL AS A MESSAGE ...


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Let the user decide because everyone is different. From the User Experience standpoint this can be tricky. If you have a very long running discussion then you have to navigate down through the whole thread until you reach the part that you're looking for. Since English speakers read from top to bottom this is somewhat intuitive, but it can be quite time ...


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I am trying to remember which email service other than gmail and office outlook groups emails with the same subject line. That said, the reason Gmail might want to show the latest email at the last is so that the user can scan through a long list of related emails and quickly get an understanding of the starting of the discussion and its current state as he ...


1

What do the people visiting the company history page want to read? What information is the company trying to communicate to those people? (Is a company history page even needed?) The answers to those questions is going to guide you to the best implementation for this particular page. I've had some clients where: The company history has been prose ...



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