Email communication is an integral part of the user experience for nearly every web application that requires a login. It’s also one of the first interactions the user has after signing up. Yet too often both the content and context of these emails is treated as an afterthought (at best), with the critical parts that users see first—sender name and email, subject, and preheader—largely overlooked. Your users, and the great application you’ve just launched, deserve better.

It started off as an honest problem with a brilliant solution. As the ways we use the web continue to grow and evolve, we, as its well-intentioned makers and stewards, needed something better than making simple collections of pages over and over again.

‘Tis a gift to be simple. Increasingly, in our line of work, ‘tis a rare gift indeed.

In an industry that extols innovation over customer satisfaction, and prefers algorithm to human judgement (forgetting that every algorithm has human bias in its DNA), perhaps it should not surprise us that toolchains have replaced know-how.

Likewise, in a field where young straight white dudes take an overwhelming majority of the jobs (including most of the management jobs) it’s perhaps to be expected that web making has lately become something of a dick measuring competition.

My first full-time developer job was at a small company. We didn’t have BrowserStack, so we cobbled together a makeshift device lab. Viewing a site I’d been making on a busted first-generation iPad with an outdated version of Safari, I saw a distorted, failed mess. It brought home to me a quote from Douglas Crockford, who once deemed the web “the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable.”