With a plain text email, I can read it at my desk without others thinking I'm not working
"Please don't change the format of Engineeringtalk", wrote one reader in our survey last week. Because of the 'plain text' format, "as it looks like any other email, I can read it at my desk without others thinking I'm not working".
I have to admit, I'd not thought of that one. Nor had I considered the situation of the reader who wrote that "it's all very well downloading and browsing through multi-megabyte PDF files with the facilities at my office, but I'm a contract engineer and I'm more often away using other people's computers. I can't subscribe to regular emails unless I know they're going to be of manageable small size".
A more frequently-expressed comment (in fact, something hundreds of you said in various ways) was that you see Engineeringtalk as a kind 'executive summary' of what's going on - a few headlines to scan through, and you know if there's anything new you should be aware of this week. "Photos are very nice, and sometimes useful", wrote one reader, "but I haven't got time to see them all chugging past on my screen as I scroll down just to see if there's something of interest to me in an issue".
Anyway, very many thanks to the hundreds of you who completed our questionnaire. Don't think the comments above represent an overwhelming majority; there's certainly a large number of you who feel that a more graphical presentation would make Engineeringtalk an even better resource, so the message to us is that if we change things, it should be as an additional alternative to the existing format, not a replacement. In fact, at the other extreme to the above, 1 in 7 of you said that not only would you prefer a 'magazine-style' format, but that you'd also prefer the 'magazine' to be emailed to you directly, even if it was several megabytes in size!
Amongst the other questions, one set of results which we'll be bringing to the attention of all the suppliers we deal with is that when you request information from them, the vast majority of you would like something back quickly, by email. Most suppliers do this, but there are still too many who just send out printed material in the post without any email correspondence.
I have to admit, I'd not thought of that one. Nor had I considered the situation of the reader who wrote that "it's all very well downloading and browsing through multi-megabyte PDF files with the facilities at my office, but I'm a contract engineer and I'm more often away using other people's computers. I can't subscribe to regular emails unless I know they're going to be of manageable small size".
A more frequently-expressed comment (in fact, something hundreds of you said in various ways) was that you see Engineeringtalk as a kind 'executive summary' of what's going on - a few headlines to scan through, and you know if there's anything new you should be aware of this week. "Photos are very nice, and sometimes useful", wrote one reader, "but I haven't got time to see them all chugging past on my screen as I scroll down just to see if there's something of interest to me in an issue".
Anyway, very many thanks to the hundreds of you who completed our questionnaire. Don't think the comments above represent an overwhelming majority; there's certainly a large number of you who feel that a more graphical presentation would make Engineeringtalk an even better resource, so the message to us is that if we change things, it should be as an additional alternative to the existing format, not a replacement. In fact, at the other extreme to the above, 1 in 7 of you said that not only would you prefer a 'magazine-style' format, but that you'd also prefer the 'magazine' to be emailed to you directly, even if it was several megabytes in size!
Amongst the other questions, one set of results which we'll be bringing to the attention of all the suppliers we deal with is that when you request information from them, the vast majority of you would like something back quickly, by email. Most suppliers do this, but there are still too many who just send out printed material in the post without any email correspondence.
posted by Chris on Thursday, November 10, 2005
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