It’s easy to dismiss email notifications as a minor feature. But our experience has taught us to take small features seriously and the serious features lightly. The latter might explain our spontaneous Nerf dart battles. The former lead to responsive email templates.
Responsive web design usually refers to, well, websites. But emails use HTML and CSS too, and appear on a variety of devices. An increasing number of people check their email on smartphones — including many ZURBians. So a while back we created our responsive email templates: Code that designers use to create messages that adapt to different screen sizes, just like websites.
The microsite we’re building for our non-profit partner sends three different emails to people:
- Daily sign-up reports to administrators
- Confirmation emails to people who buy tickets for an event
- Reminder messages three days before the event takes place
Volunteer Daniel Ranzi Werle, Interaction Designer and Partner at Nextt, took on the task of pushing our templates a little further. Namely, to Gmail and Outlook.
He and Arthur used Litmus.com to test the revised HTML and CSS across many platforms and operating systems. It took some tweaking, but they got it to work.
So what are you waiting for? Pull out your smartphone and check out the wonderful world of responsive email templates.